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Overview
Time to join us for yet another wonderful horror movie in our brand new, shiny season. Grab a snack, cuddle up with the tv dinner, or just the good ole’ movie popcorn. Lotsa butter. And get ready to feast.
Or don’t. I mean, why the heck would you be eating while watching a French extremist movie that has a big of cannibalism going on. Are you crazy?
And before you ask, why are we doing another French extremity movie? We have to, it’s in our contract. So buckle up, buttercup.
What does this movie have going for it? Vet school. Soccer. Girls peeing like guys. Edible fingers – yeah, finger food.
As Rhys said, this movie gives you a bit of a queasy feeling. If all this sounds like your type of movie, welcome to season 06!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_(film)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4954522
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Transcript
[00:00:00]
Stephen: Here we are, first episode for season six, and it’s a doozy one to start with. French extremist called Raw.
Rhys: Yes. And oddly enough when we start talking about the director, she doesn’t necessarily see this as some kind of horror movie. So
Stephen: Wow. It, political statement maybe, or something. Alright, so raw it is, let’s get going. Let’s talk about it.
Rhys: It is a film from 2016. It is considered part of the new French extremity. It was shot in Belgium because the veterinary school that they use as a backdrop was in Belgium. And
Stephen: I, so it was a real veterinary school that there’s a few things that they do in the hazing. I wondering if that really do some of that. That’s,
Rhys: yeah it came out in 2016 to a show it released in the box office in 2017. It had a. Three and a half million dollar budget. And the box office
Stephen: blood. I think
Rhys: yeah, and the box [00:01:00] office was 3 million, so Yeah. Missed
Stephen: that’s a lot better than a lot of horror movies, so
Rhys: oh, especially like new French extremity films.
Stephen: not exactly. Most Americans top choice.
Rhys: Yes. It’s an hour and 39 minutes. Which for me, Steve and I have talked about this. I felt every hour and 39 minutes of that film. It was nominated for 70 awards and won 25.
Stephen: Wow. That’s really good.
Rhys: yeah, the film was written and directed by Julia Decar. She was born in 83 and is a trained screenwriter from Lefa in Paris, which sounds like a. A high end Institute of film. She went in for screenwriting, actually. She didn’t go in as a director. She went in as a screenwriter. She has eight directorial [00:02:00] entries in her IMDB, and it starts with a 22 minute short called Junior.
Stephen: Which we get a lot of that with horror.
Rhys: We do
Stephen: and they move on to other things. It’s like proving grounds, which I think is great. We’ve watch, we’ve been watching more shorts ourselves lately.
Rhys: we have actually junior won a petite rail door at Cannes in 2011, which is basically like best of show for shorts, which is pretty impressive. It also raw won a Reky award from the International Federation of Film Critics in 2016. And she won the Palm Dora at Canne being the first solo female director to ever win one in 2021 for her film.
Titan
Stephen: Wow. So basically she’s a horror director to watch. Keep an eye on.
Rhys: Absolutely her next movie it’s releasing in October, [00:03:00] it’s called Alpha.
Stephen: And look, the other one she did, do you know, are they all the French extremity type or is she doing like more quote unquote typical horror or something like that?
Rhys: So I watched Titan and I thought. Between the two. They’re both like extremist films. Titan was a little bit more out there story-wise, and instead of trying to parse it, I thought we’d just stick with raw. ’cause it’s pretty straightforward.
Stephen: Okay.
Rhys: If you, I recommend watching Titan. Everyone at some point in time should check it out.
It’s a pretty brutal film about a sociopathic woman who is slowly turning into titanium. It’s a very odd premise for a film, but very well done. Good enough to get her basically the best of show at cans in 2021.
Stephen: m Knight Shalan should do a movie together. That would be [00:04:00] a whacked out movie.
Rhys: She actually has a friend that we all know. Oh, the guy who did the fly famous body horror Cronenberg. David
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: is a huge fan of hers and like they met at cans and, compared notes, she doesn’t consider her stuff body horror, which I don’t know necessarily that I agree with her, but yeah, the two of them hit it off
Stephen: that’s another common thing though. I, we’ve heard that from other Dr. Yeah. I don’t really consider it to be this type of thing, but everybody else is really? Yeah, that’s exactly what did it,
Rhys: yeah. Hereditary wasn’t a horror movie, it was a movie about family family struggles. Yeah, I don’t think
Stephen: With one decapitation.
Rhys: She was the youngest child of two. Her parents were both doctors. She told her parents that she wanted to write and then eventually became a screenwriter and her parents were supportive.
Of anything she wanted to do as long as it wasn’t medicine.
Stephen: Just do horror about [00:05:00] medicine horror movies.
Rhys: it’s a trend, right? Whatever you’re doing, you’re like, you wouldn’t recommend it to your kids ’cause you see the ugly underside of your
Stephen: Except for the family in this film that are like all veterinarians or? No, they’re all vegetarian veterinarians.
Rhys: Yeah. While she was in university, she studied screenwriting. And a lot of what they did was they would write and then everybody would look at each other’s work and criticize it. And it was the nerd department of the school, so like you could go to school. The directors she said, were like the rock stars.
Everybody thought they were the best students and this stuff. And the screenwriters were not, they were seen as geeks. And from the sounds of it, it was really brutal. Like she had professors who just would rip stuff up constantly looking back on it. Now she sees it as a good thing. So
Stephen: I love to hear that. ’cause that’s pretty common. Just look back at our seventh and eighth grade band year,
Rhys: yeah. And I run into that we had a [00:06:00] very skilled director who was very demanding when we were in seventh and eighth grade. And I look back on it fondly and I know people who do not, who were like
Stephen: if I’d describe it fondly, isn’t necessarily my description, but appreciative definitely of the, what it instilled and how good we were. Honestly, without being too awfully biased, I don’t think I’ve heard a seventh and eighth grade band that has sounded that good. You go back and listen to the stuff it was pretty good.
But, they always say, pressure builds diamonds. So
Rhys: Oh yeah, there you go. Look at you pulling out catchphrases.
Stephen: That’s hard to remember that one.
Rhys: Dick though also she says that she sees writing and is basically directing and vice versa. It’s just writing. You’re doing it ahead of time and directing. You’re doing it in the moment. You’re actually forming the story in the moment. Which I thought, yeah, it was an interesting theory.
I haven’t heard anyone else [00:07:00] address.
Stephen: That’s the other good thing about being horror. A horror, but small horror movies is you got a lot more control. You can write, you can direct it, and it can be awesome. Everything what you wanted, so I think that’s a good approach for a lot of these,
Rhys: Yeah. She also seems to have a bit of a muse. And it’s not unlike Oz Perkins had that one girl who was amazing in the black coats daughter. She turns up in long legs, junior was this gross dark comedy. It was this short movie about a girl achieving puberty. And I haven’t seen it, I haven’t been able to find it.
I’ve been looking. But it starred Garance Meier, who is the star of Raw and who is also in Titan. She’s not the star of Titan, but like of all of the movies that duke Grau has Meier is in at least three [00:08:00] of them. And it’s also funny, she plays the Prepubescent character, Justine, which is the name of the character in Raw who basically just aged with her.
And she played the character. I don’t know if the character in Titan is Justine or not. However, the main character in Titan is named Alex, which is Justine’s sister’s name in raw. So she likes to recycle
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Stephen King does that a lot too.
Rhys: Yeah, all the Danny’s out there and yeah. She worked on the script for a while in research and she was trying to figure out how to take Justine from this cute, relatable character at the start of the movie to have them commit these atrocious taboos. Taboos. And she wanted to see what happens and was fascinated by the character and the [00:09:00] journey that they were on. So you do take Justine at the start of this film who’s just this straightforward kid, first year in college, like interacts with her parents, interacts with her sister the exact same way. The university is a little extreme on the hazing side. Maybe that’s just France, I don’t know. But. She does do this thing where everything just seems normal up until a point, and then all of a sudden it just sits there and teeters on the edge of normalcy and then it just falls right off the cliff.
Stephen: Yeah. And I’m glad you said that because I actually thought a couple times in the movie it’s wow, this girl’s character story arc is like crazy. So she must have brought it out. If that popped into my head while watching it,
Rhys: Yeah. It was really interesting to me because the story arc really is like normal and then crazy and then this struggle to try and get back to normalcy, which I don’t [00:10:00] think she ever really achieves.
Stephen: no new normal.
Rhys: Justine is played by car. I, she was born in Paris in 98. How old are we?
Stephen: Yeah. I.
Rhys: She started out as a musician playing trombone and percussion,
Stephen: Nice. That covers both of us.
Rhys: as you were a percussionist. And I played trombone. She started her career acting with Decar in junior. And then worked for her on Mon, which was Reno’s second piece. It was a made for TV movie, which was apparently very bizarre as well.
I think that would probably be even harder to find than
Stephen: Yeah. A French made for TV movie. Yeah. That might be rough
Rhys: Then she was in Raw and then she acted in Titan, which puts her in half of all the projects that Kunos ever worked on. She has worked with other people and her, IM 24 Titles. They’re all French it’s nothing that you and I know, but she does have two upcoming [00:11:00] projects and look for those.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: I don’t know, wherever I might come across them.
Stephen: Your local French extremist movie theater.
Rhys: Yes. Oh my gosh. Can you imagine if somebody opened one of those?
Stephen: It, where we live. That would not last at all.
Rhys: Yeah. They’d have three people.
Stephen: But the good news is you’d always have a good seat if you went.
Rhys: That’s true. That’s true for all the horror right in front of you on the huge, giant screen.
Stephen: Yes. Yeah. That, that you don’t want these movies to be four D where it’s things interactive.
Rhys: Yeah. Ella Rump plays Alexis. She is Parisian born. She’s an award winner. She won a Cesar. She has 19 projects on her cv, including Marguerite’s Theorem, which is the one she won awards for a couple episodes of succession. So there’s something for our domestic audience there. [00:12:00] And she has two upcoming projects, Novak and Coture, again, with G.
So the two of them are both in that film. I think it’s actually more of a documentary about like culture and style in France.
Stephen: Oh, that, that would be cool too, though.
Rhys: yeah. Rabba Knight, offi, I’m probably slaughtering that name ’cause it’s not French. I imagine it’s Middle Eastern or some sort of Moroccan. He plays Adrian.
He’s been in 38 pieces. Again, we won’t know any of them. He does have one upcoming film called La Gang de Amazon, so the gang of Amazons.
Stephen: That sounds like an old Tarzan movie.
Rhys: Yes. Joanna Priest is listed as just listed in the credits as La Mer the mother. She was born in Marsai in 72. She has 44 films on her cv.
And the last credited person I’ll mention is Laurent [00:13:00] Lucas. And he is listed in the credits as Lapper. Now the interesting thing, he’s Parisian born, he was born in 68.
He’s got 95 credits. He started acting in 89 and he’s no stranger to horror or body horror. He was in two French body horror films called In My Skin and Delinquent, and I don’t think I’ve actually seen either of them, but he’s no stranger to the new French Extremity movement. When you talk about the early days of it, there’s a handful of phi, like ion and eel.
And martyrs. Another name that comes out there is Calver. And he was the main person in Calver, which is just this guy who sells stuff out of the or no, he is a traveling musician, I think who breaks down
Stephen: professor Harold Hill.
Rhys: Yes. Breaks down in a really bad town and gets taken in by a really bad man and [00:14:00] really bad things happen to him for the entirety of the film.
I thought it was a really nice nod to bring him into this film.
Stephen: Nice. Okay.
Rhys: It was originally rated NC 17.
Stephen: Wow, that’s French.
Rhys: They did some editing and it got knocked back down to an R rating. There was tons of controversy when it showed which, you expect for this kind of thing in a theater in la they handed out custom made vomit bags and at the Gutenberg film Festival, people fainted, threw up and 30 people left in the middle of the film.
It was such a thing. They had to pause the movie to handle all of the chaos before they started up again.
Stephen: Wow. What is this? The 1930s, not the 2020s.
Rhys: For all of our video
Stephen: They, they really should have done not the custom vomit bags. They should have had pickled rabbit kidneys that you could buy and eat [00:15:00] for snacks.
Rhys: Yeah. Pickled at least. So you don’t break out in a rash.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: For all the video game heads out there, this is one of Hideo Kamas favorite films. So
Stephen: That’ll get a lot of people watching it. Hey Philip and your crew. There you go. There’s a movie for you.
Rhys: Yeah. And yeah, I think that’s pretty much all we have for pre-press, so let’s talk about the movie.
Stephen: Which, makes sense. It does seem like a small film. There’s a lot of people, but most of them are just background. There’s a few main people.
Rhys: It’s true. I found some amazing interviews with Julia Duco. No, sit down in a panel in front of people for an hour. So she like sat there and she talked about all of her major works. It was really enlightening and, just great to come across that I didn’t have to go and scrape, different things from different interviews with this magazine or this magazine.
These were like big full forum things
Stephen: Nice. Yeah. Other countries have different [00:16:00] way, different expectation, treatment of horror. It is even hard sometimes to get some of the American horror to find stuff about, ’cause not as many people are looking for interviews. So
Rhys: And it’s true, like Titan, won, she won the palm door for that. That is like the best picture, just at Cannes. And she won that. There being only the second woman ever to have won that award, which is just,
Stephen: horror.
Rhys: yeah. And it was a horror film, right?
Stephen: You talk about that in your talk about how many years we’ve done awards and how many have been horror.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just, we gotta stop looking to the academy,
Stephen: yeah. We need something different. Okay. Let’s go, let’s, so you can get this off your list.
Rhys: So movie starts. It just raw, giant letters, bright red. I mean it, it’s like just this is what you can expect in this film. We’re just gonna hit you in the head with this.
Stephen: Yes. And that’s not the first time [00:17:00] they’ll hit you in the head.
Rhys: That’s right. And it’s, I think it’s important to state that the subject matter of the film isn’t necessarily nihilistic horrific stuff that you expect with a Martyrs or Calver or any of those other ones. This is just a very squirmy film for me. Like when I watch it, you get that like you butt clinches up ’cause you’re like, yeah, I really don’t, I don’t know that I wanna be watching someone do this.
But
Stephen: Right, and it is, it’s pretty horrific in a few spots.
Rhys: yes. The film starts with these beautiful, picturesque shots of the Belgian landscape. You just have this person walking down the road, this tree lined street. They’re very long shots luxurious, drawn out like you were saying, for Black Mountain side, if you’re gonna be in Canada where it’s gorgeous, take advantage of that.
Stephen: Right, and I did make note that [00:18:00] it seems like, maybe it’s just the French ones, but a lot of the foreign horror we get have long stretches, not just at the beginning, but throughout the film where they’re filming and the story’s progressing, but there’s not a lot of dialogue that you’re getting, you’re almost feeling the person’s inner thoughts.
I seem to see that more with some of the foreign films in American. We gotta explain everything and fill it in with dialogue all the time. I think a lot of the foreign stuff for us they don’t seem to need to do that all the time. This movie has several of those.
Rhys: So you have the pedestrian, then you have a car, then you go back to the tree lined colon aid on the road, and the pedestrian’s not there, and the car’s going and out of nowhere the pedestrian comes out from behind a tree and falls in the road in front of the car, and the car swerves and hits a tree.
And then we get our title card and they, oh, you see the pedestrian get up and walk over towards the [00:19:00] car. But so he walks over to, they walk over to the car, then you get the title card raw and you’re like, what was that? What just happened
Stephen: It’s definitely one of those. Remember this for later.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: really does explain things.
Rhys: You said it edits out quiet spots
Stephen: Yep.
Rhys: all we have the mother and the parents and Justine at a diner, and it becomes established that the family is vegan like aggressively. Because there happens to be some kind of morsel of meat in Justine’s potatoes and the mother goes up to complain about it.
Stephen: Yeah, and she’s really, like you said, aggressive about it. Which I, I love when, they always say in writing, show don’t tell, and, this is one of those, like getting the feel of the character and explaining the character without just beating you with an info dump. But I, I was thinking at this point, it’s wow, that’s a little it stands out a little too much to me, but, I can see why they [00:20:00] did it later.
Rhys: I thought it was a very interesting contrast between the father who is like hanging out with the daughter. I know your mom’s freaking out. It’s just gonna happen. And the mom who is super uptight, it’s like very common. Differences in parenting that you see so. The rest of the part that comes after that.
There’s like pretty standard family road trip, car scenes. They have the dog there. You can tell that the daughter has some nervousness. You get the feeling that she’s going off somewhere, probably college, just based on her age. And they get to this empty parking lot and just drop Justine off.
Her sister was supposed to meet her there. But her sister doesn’t show up and her dad’s she’ll be fine. Just leave her.
Stephen: That does not look like college campus moving day. That I remember
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. Nobody else seems to be there,
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: but she apparently gets herself settled [00:21:00] because in the next scene she’s being woken by her roommate, who is a young gay man. And there’s lots of loud sounds coming from outside the dorm,
Stephen: and the, oh she was like, oh, you’re not a girl. And
Rhys: Yeah, I requested a girl.
Stephen: yeah. That’s just another thing that stuck out as people would freak out about that if it was an American campus, on campus at least.
Rhys: Yeah. I mean they both had their own private space, so you know, but still, if you were expecting one and got the other, and if you don’t know what the movie’s about, it might seem like it’s about an assault because these guys come in and throw all their shit out windows and herd everybody out into the halls.
Stephen: A new sub genre. We need home invasion. Dorm invasion movies.
Rhys: it’s just a hazing ritual, but like it’s the most intense hazing ritual I’ve.
Stephen: Yeah. Throwing all those shit out the window. Wow. Hope you don’t have an heirloom that you brought along. You don’t have mom in an urn [00:22:00] on your shelf
Rhys: that’d be quite the, they’re French. They’d probably be like, eh
Stephen: little brooms and brush it back up.
Rhys: everybody goes out and they’re forced to crawl around on their hands and knees. And were formally introduced to Justine and Adrian, the roommates as they introduce themselves to each other. And they
Stephen: I love how they’re just now there, but they’re just going along with it. They’re not, they don’t even seem to be freaking out a bit. It’s just okay, let’s get it over with.
Rhys: yeah. But it all ends up in some giant rave. There’s music and dancing and drugs. At the time of shooting grants was 17 years old. And I don’t know that really comes into play, aside from the fact that she was very young. She acted all of her own scenes, with the exception of the bikini wax scenes.
They had a body double in for those. And we meet Justine’s sister Alex. She’s there, [00:23:00] she’s been there. She’s an upperclassman. She is thoroughly trashed.
Stephen: Not for the first time in or not for the last time in this movie.
Rhys: that’s right. She takes Justine and they’re walking around through some like dark thing and they do this whole flashbulb beam only. It’s with the lights. The lights flash on and then they flash off and there’s like bottles of deformed animals and stuff. And they eventually end up in this hallway with pictures of students from the past years.
And they can see that some of the students in the pictures had their heads cut out. And those are the ones who didn’t make it through the initiation. So if that happens to your persona, non grata, but they do find a photograph with their parents in it. So we know that their parents both went to the same school and are probably veterinarians.
Stephen: and they seemed happy. They said they look happy.
Rhys: Yes. It’s really odd to me. It seems like there’s a billion [00:24:00] veterinarians going to school here.
Stephen: I was wondering about that. I’m like, how many veterinarians per capita do they need in France?
Rhys: Yeah. Alex finally makes it to bed only to have a roommate come back to the dorm with what I assume is a sexual partner. ’cause they’re making sexy noises outside the door.
Stephen: It is a college dorm. There was no sock on the Do some
Rhys: Then you have this horse like passed out in a sling. There’s people wearing scrubs. The horse gets this big shot of ketamine. Now I’m seeing why they have so many raves actually considering it passes out and they intubate it and then pull it up so it’s hanging from the stu from the ceiling and all
Stephen: I was wondering about that scene though, because if you’re trying to show a progression of the newbies, through the year, whatever it happens to be at this point is the first thing these kids are gonna do is witness a horse being drugged and operated on or something. I’m like, that seems like they’re jumping ahead of where they should be.
Rhys: It might [00:25:00] be, or it might be like, Hey, we’re gonna show you this super cool thing and this is what you get to look forward to if you stick with us for a year.
Stephen: Yeah. And now how many of you are dropping after seeing this? Yeah, I could see that too, I guess
Rhys: Yeah. All the students are standing in the group. Some of the older students come in marching in singing vulgar song and then this like random drop of blood faults on the new students. It’s esque, right?
Justine looks up and all of a sudden all of this blood just pours down on top of them, and Dureau actually wanted to be in that scene.
She wanted to have the fake blood poured all over her too, so she was one of the students hanging out back there.
Stephen: Now, the really part that astounds me about this whole ra hazing initiation is the coordination that all the upperclassmen are doing. I don’t think when I was in school, the upperclassmen would’ve been that coordinated for that long to do hazing
Rhys: It seems like they do it every year, [00:26:00] so they bust, have it down to a system,
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: After you get all the blood poured on it, you have to eat this raw rabbit kidney. And of all the things involved, the fact that it’s meat and cheese vegetarian is what upsets Justine
Stephen: Right.
Rhys: about it. Not the fact that, Hey, here’s this raw organ of an animal.
We want you to just pop in your mouth.
Stephen: And that, that’s a lot of rabbits they go through. ’cause there’s a lot of kids here.
Rhys: yeah, Alex comes out and she’s you gotta do it. And she’s I’m not going to. And she’s you have to. And she forces her to eat it. And she gets a couple steps away before she starts to wretch, but she manages to keep it under control. and then there’s another scene of them sitting around shortly after that where they’re discussing the sentient of animals and whether raping a monkey is the same as raping a person because sentient creatures too.
Stephen: That actually [00:27:00] came across as, yeah, okay. That seems very like 20-year-old college sitting around the breakfast table because that’s the stupid conversations you would actually have. But I, the part I really love is for the next couple scenes, they’re all walking around. They still have blood on their clothes, blood in their hair.
They’re just going around the rest of the day with blood slowly congealing and smelly and everything.
Rhys: Yeah. They’re sitting in class. Adrian’s trying to cheat off of Justine. She’s trying to cover up her paper, telling him that it’s easy stuff and she takes her paper up to the professor and he is oh, I see one you missed already. And she’s what? And he just marks it off back in bed. She’s trying to fall asleep.
And she finds out that she’s really itchy and she’s got this rash everywhere. Bad case of hives is really what it looks like.
Stephen: Horrible. So this is where the first thing in my head is okay, so because she was vegetarian, is it the meat that did it? Was there something in the pickled or, obviously [00:28:00] we’re supposed to think that, something along those lines. But I’m thinking why such a bad case of these hives for her, obviously what’s it hinting at for things to come?
Rhys: Yeah. She also finds that she’s hungry at the same time, and then we go to a scene of the horse from the surgery earlier in the day running on a treadmill, and it fades to black.
Stephen: Yeah, that was one of those, okay, what the hell is going on here now?
Rhys: I could see it as maybe some sort of symbol for, like the horse went through a struggle and emerged stronger on the other side, and maybe that’s what the hazing ritual’s supposed to be.
Stephen: At least I was fearing like the horse is gonna be running and all of a sudden like it’s stomach gets slit and all its guts fall out or something. That’s what I was waiting for, so I was hesitant on that.
Rhys: Wow.
Stephen: Oh, it’s French extremist,
Rhys: it’s true. You never know. You never know. Justine ends up in the nurse’s office. She doesn’t have [00:29:00] any known allergies. The hives are already starting to peel, so it was pretty quick. The nurses like, that was stupid. Why would you do that? And she’s they said I had to. And so French, the nurse lights up a cigarette in the examination room while she’s lecturing her about how stupid it was to eat that. Then she tells this story about some fat girl and bullying. It’s just so funny because so much of the start of this movie is all about peer pressure and bullying, and you have this one pseudo authority figure who’s it’s stupid. I don’t know why you do it.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. And she’s a crotchety old lady, yeah.
Rhys: She gets stopped in the hallway as she’s walking back to either class or her room. She’s told she has to change her clothes because first years are supposed to be wearing something hot. So she ends up late to class and they’re doing an ultrasound of a cow’s uterus. And because she didn’t have [00:30:00] anything hot to wear, she had to wear a diaper instead.
So she’s walking around campus wearing a large cloth diaper. Alex is gonna loan her some clothes, so she’ll have something to wear. It looks like she’s copying off of Alex’s paper and Alex is yells at her about it, but she’s not copying off it, she’s correcting her answers because apparently she is the more academic of the two sisters.
Stephen: Yeah. And it shows, Alex seemed more like a wild child. But later you question a bit, was she always like that or is she just like that after a year of school? It seems more like she’s always like that, but it was a question.
Rhys: Yeah. So her sister gives her some clothes and then kicks her out. She goes back and grabs her mattress and starts to drag it up the stairs, wearing her high heels in the dress. And so
Stephen: Yeah. Why didn’t she take the shoes off?
Rhys: They’re all supposed to be hot, so shows up in her dorm to try and get Adrian to help. But Adrian’s in the process of. Receiving a blowjob from some [00:31:00] guy. So I guess he’s tied up right now.
Stephen: Yeah, something to walk in on. And they don’t even flinch about it except her.
Rhys: Yeah, they’re going through the cafeteria line. Adrian’s getting pretty much nothing but meat.
Justine’s still eating only vegetables, but then she tries to steal a hamburger patty by putting it in her pocket, which the cashier’s you’ve got something in your pocket, I need to ring it up. Adrian’s do you need money? And she’s no. She just doesn’t want people to know she’s eating meat. So he takes her out to get some meat. They take like a bus. They go past down past a road that looks like a tree lined colonnade and there was a car accident there. And then they basically end up at a gas station and order some shawarma.
Stephen: Gas Station Schwar. That’s perfect.
Rhys: Yeah, Adrian’s kind of rude about truck drivers in general being hopped up on drugs, driving [00:32:00] around and then one of them hears them and comes over and aggressively addresses it, but there’s no fight or anything like that. He’s just yeah, okay, whatever. You guys, go ahead and be your vets.
Leave us working folk alone.
Stephen: Right.
Rhys: And so later that night when they get back, Justine is still hungry, so she goes out and grabs raw chicken breast out of the fridge and starts eating it.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen the Santa Clarita diet with Drew Barrymore and Timothy Al DeFonte?
Rhys: I have not watched it now.
Stephen: It, this is like that when she starts turning into the zombie or whatever she just starts devouring raw meat and everything. Then she like throws up and that’s a hrif pretty horrific scene too.
Rhys: Turns out this was sugar. This was like a gummy candy made to look like a chicken filet.
Stephen: yeah, but if you have to shoot this scene more than once,
Rhys: Oh, she said it turned her off. Candy having to do that.
She gets yelled at by [00:33:00] her professor the next day because obviously either she or Adrian was cheating and he wants to know who it was. He knows who it was. He just wants her to say it. While she’s there, she’s chewing on her hair because she’s nervous, and then eventually ends up going into the bathroom to throw up because she’s ingested tons and tons of hair.
Stephen: yeah. Yeah. Not just a little bit of hair stuck in her mouth. It looked like a Japanese movie at this point with the hair.
Rhys: yes. It was a, it’s a very visual throwing up scene.
Stephen: I’m pretty impressed even having to hold a lot of that hair, whatever it was in your mouth, to pull out for the scene doing that, that was enough to
Rhys: Pretty gross. Yeah. And she leaves and there’s girl’s use two fingers. It comes up easier, making some bulimia reference.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: She does track her sister down, her sister’s armpit deep in a cow’s butt. And they go up and there’s on the roof. [00:34:00] And Alex is you’re always parent’s favorite, but hey, check it out.
I can pee standing up. And she tries to get Justine to try it, and she just manages to pee down the side of her leg.
Stephen: Which they find hilarious ’cause they’re getting drunk and slap happy and whatever else. So yeah, that, that was a funny scene.
Rhys: it was. And it seems like that where I can see Renos, she’s this was a dark comedy. Like I would say it had comedic moments, but I don’t know that it’s
Stephen: Kind of like saying whatever the werewolf movie from a couple years ago was a horror movie with the sparkly vampires,
Rhys: Oh yeah. Twilight.
Stephen: Twilight. Yeah. It’s like saying that’s a horror movie.
Rhys: she’s gonna spend the night at her sister’s. There’s this waxing her sister’s I’ve been waxing myself since I was 11 or something like that, and you’re a mess. And so she’s gonna wax her sister.
Stephen: Which for a French film, I could see that, why it [00:35:00] got at it. ’cause they’re, they have more different feelings or whatever about body hair. ’cause the one scene when she rolls over in bed, she has her arm up and she has armpit hair. And that’s a common thing for the culture. So it, this was interesting, this was another thing, another change to your life, another transformation in your life.
Rhys: yeah. The first pool goes fine, obviously painful, but the second pool does not though it sticks and it won’t come off and it won’t come off. So her sister goes to get some scissors. And then Justine freaks out and like smacks her sister and the scissors clamp down and take her sister’s index finger off.
Stephen: Now what type, what God scissors are these that have that much pressure that cut through a bone because it’s not it’s in the middle of a bone somewhere and I’m like, holy crap. That is a lot of pressure coming from those little scissors
Rhys: They were big, the scissors were [00:36:00] huge,
Stephen: they were.
Rhys: big for, anything that I would want anywhere down in that region of my body. But,
Stephen: very true.
Rhys: Her sister instantly passes out. She runs around and finds the finger. They have a dog there named Quickie, which is a weird name for a dog, they’re French.
Justine finds a finger and she’s sitting there holding it, and Erno is talking about it in the panel where she’s so she’s holding this finger and she’s looking for ice, and you’re in a dorm room. There’s no ice. She’s looking for a container to put it in. There’s no container, but it’s spill blood all over her hand, and the blood starts to run out of the side of her hand.
And what do you do? You just instinctively put that in your mouth, which is what she does. And then the next thing you know, she’s eating her sister’s finger.
Stephen: Yeah. Okay. So now we know things are definitely gone downhill from here. You can start to understand why they’re vegetarians,
Rhys: this is probably when all the people started throwing up and passing out and leaving the theater.[00:37:00]
Stephen: but still, it wasn’t enough to gross me out that bad.
Rhys: Her sister does wake up to see her do it.
Stephen: Yes. That would really make holidays difficult
Rhys: It would
Stephen: that. Yeah.
Rhys: ate my fucking finger.
Stephen: every holiday you gotta bring it up again.
Rhys: they’re at the hospital now.
Stephen: Oh the music right there when she was doing that sounded like something from Phantom of the Opera. If you listen to the music and I just thought that was like this dramatic thing, with her eating that it was, it made me chuckle.
So maybe it is kind a dark comedy because I have a warp sense of humor. ’cause I’ve chuckled several times already during this movie.
Rhys: If and if you’re into that kind of Euro trash club music, this movie is full of it. There’s lots of it and it’s not the kind of stuff that, I suppose it’s a lot easier now to find, but, back in our day, you’d never actually hear that because nobody in the states would ever listen to [00:38:00] something that wasn’t in English.
But yeah it’s really good club music. Her sister Alex actually blames the dog for eating the finger. And they say the dog’s gonna have to be put down, which everyone’s sad about, but nobody’s correcting her sister on what happens.
Stephen: So they say that I’m starting to think are they going to eat the dog? So that was just,
Rhys: and we’re back to bone Tomahawk. The parents have left a and so the two of them head out their head out into a beautiful Belgian countryside, treeline road colonnade, and it turns out that the person who is jumping out in front of cars making the swerve and smash is Alex. And the reason she does it is she also has a taste for human flesh.
So once they get in the accident, she just finds whoever seems like they’re about to die, and she starts.
Stephen: Yes. And so now I’m going, okay wait. So is this a familial thing? [00:39:00] Like you, you’re now in vet school and this is why we’re vegetarians because our family has this, desire to eat people after we eat a kidney. Or is it something that everybody does in the school or, there were some questions here at this point.
Rhys: Justine’s upset by the whole thing and like just takes off. And like she’s got blood on her shirt and she’s upset by that. So she just takes her shirt off as she’s walking down the road and, French traffic, they’re not gonna stop for some.
Stephen: Very close to LA traffic actually. Come to think of it.
Rhys: Back in class, Alex comes in to check on Justine and she seems a little taken aback by how easily her sister is just tearing into a dog’s corpse that they have to dissect. It doesn’t seem to bother her at all.
Stephen: No.
Rhys: There’s some more hazing going on, and then there’s a pickup soccer game. Adrian’s actually pretty good.
But Justine,
Stephen: what they’re all watching
Rhys: is not, she is very hungrily looking at Adrian [00:40:00] as he’s playing. And then all of a sudden she gets this nosebleed, which is actually a very popular shot for the posters, for this shit, for this film. Then you have this scene where she seems to just be going a little crazy. She’s listening to some really questionable rap music in her headphones.
Stephen: Yeah, that rap song, the lyrics, because I’m like, holy crap. What? I’m like, this is, we think Beastie Boys or NWA is bad. What is this?
Rhys: Yeah, it it was pretty, pretty extreme. The music was good, but the lyrics were, but she’s like dancing. She’s like kissing herself in the mirror. She goes to leave her bedroom and Adrian is out in her in the common room playing video games with Alex, her sister, and then she tells Alex to keep her hands off Adrian.
And Alex is I didn’t even know that was a thing. He’s gay.
Stephen: So this whole [00:41:00] scene now, hey, I’m gonna shout, we mentioned gaming in Philip. I’m gonna shout out to all the gamers that are watching this. You know how every profession watches movies and they see their profession and they’re like, ah, that’s not what we really do. Ah, that’s not what it really looks like.
Ah, and all that. Okay. Gamers take a look at this scene. They are playing an FPS, multiplayer FPS, and they’re not touching a single thumb stick the whole time. They’re just hitting buttons like it’s an Atari. I’m like, yeah, they’re not really playing.
Rhys: They’re using the deep pad to move.
Stephen: It doesn’t even look like that because it looks like they’re just hitting buttons over and over. Yeah. So get, there you go, gamers. You got a good scene here to complain about not being realistic in the real world.
Rhys: There you go. We cut to the scene where Justine’s under the sheets and she’s getting beaten on by external forces. She gets out of bed and it’s this really surreal, amazing shot of the hallway. And she’s walking down and like [00:42:00] they coat her in paint and basically encourage sexual assault ’cause she’s in blue and this guy’s in yellow and they stuff them in a closet.
Say, don’t come out until you’re green.
Stephen: It’s, it is a little worse than the the scenes similar scene in Teen Wolf where they get shoved in the closet and he turns werewolf.
Rhys: Yeah. But they do start to make out and she basically takes a chunk out of the guy’s lip, maybe, I don’t know, a quarter inch or so out of his bottom lip. Adrian seems to notice that. It’s really interesting how they notice each other. Like she notices him playing soccer ’cause he is running around topless and he notices the fact that, oh, she bit that guy so much that he’s bleeding, she’s in the shower, washing off all the paint she reaches in, pulls a piece of the guy’s lip out from between her teeth and then proceeds to just go ahead and eat it.
Stephen: It probably wouldn’t go down the drain anyway.
Rhys: yeah. She [00:43:00] comes out, Adrian’s sit there smoking a joint. They’re having this little heart to heart, and he’s he’s trying to figure her out. He tells her and she’s like, why do you care? And it just turns into perhaps one of the most frenetic sex scenes ever in cinema. There’s a whole lot of thrashing around.
She bites him a couple times in the end as she’s climaxing, she’s biting her own arm to the point where it bleeds. So she’s not biting him.
Stephen: Yeah. We, we should have just done a whole season of weird sex scenes or extreme sex scenes. ’cause we’ve had quite a few.
Rhys: Horror is steeped in it. I spit on your grave is basically just that.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: The next morning she sees her sister walking across campus just on her own. There’s that scene cut later in class. She gets a text from her sister about the dog being put down. She asked Adrian [00:44:00] if he and her sister had ever messed around and he storms out saying he’s gay and he didn’t hide in the closet for 20 years just to fuck girls.
And then
Stephen: I think now death protests too much here.
Rhys: We cut to a party, another rave, and you have this couple there. And the girl literally is like licking a guy’s eyeball.
Stephen: I, you gotta wonder some of this stuff that’s going on, are they just trying to be extreme or is she trying to be
Rhys: that erotic?
Stephen: Yeah we’re just too old, for this
Rhys: I’ve never been able to handle people touching my eyes much
Stephen: Oh yeah. Contacts take time to get used to,
Rhys: Couldn’t do it. Justine’s there watching Seemingly hungry. She’s getting completely trashed. Shot after shot. She’s walking through the party, trashed and her sister takes her into a morgue and there’s a hard cut to the next morning.
Something’s got something happened.
Stephen: yeah, because she wakes up. Where am I in bed? It’s one of those oh, okay.
Rhys: This is [00:45:00] the unwelcome after she comes back from the forest and you’re like, oh, something happened.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah. She goes to class. People are staring at her. People are moving away from her. On her way out, Adrian is waiting for her and he shows her this video of her and her sister.
And her sister is in the morgue with her. And, she’s got a body on the slab and she like flops the arm down and like acts like she’s talking to a dog to her sister saying, come and bite it and then brings the hand up. And her sister’s so drunk she can’t really stand and this is what everyone’s like disgusted by.
Stephen: Yeah and so I, it’s like why is the sister teasing her about this and knows, obviously seems to know what’s going on with her, so that was an interesting thing right now.
Rhys: Yeah. It doesn’t quite explain itself,
Stephen: yeah.[00:46:00]
Rhys: but you get a feel for it in the next scene where they meet in the quad and start fighting each other and it really is. Two girls biting each other is what it really boils down to. Alex takes a chunk out of her cheek and Justine, where does she bite her?
Like in the shoulder or something? I don’t know. But there’s a lot of blood being drawn through people’s teeth.
Stephen: yeah.
Rhys: People try and break the fight up, which is the last thing you want to do to siblings. ’cause they instantly turn on those two people and then they’re like, we love each other again. And they walk off.
Stephen: Yes. They did that so much. It’s Hey, you can’t beat on her. I didn’t doing that, yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: So they’re walking back, they’re ha they’re having this talk and she almost locks her sister in a room when she goes to leave. But it turns out her sister is cannibal just like her only, she’s been doing it for longer and she’s pretty good at it, cause car accidents and run out and eat people, that kind of thing.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: So this is why she [00:47:00] almost locks her up and it’s like that thing where she wants to go back to normal. Then you have this very confusing scene where like everybody is sleeping outside on the ground and starting to wake up, and there’s this guy like standing amidst all of these people just looking around.
Justine is sleeping in Adrian’s bed and like she turns over and looks at him and he’s not moving. And she pulls the blankets back and there’s significant amounts of his thigh missing.
Stephen: Yeah, that was a pretty gruesome scene. I wanna talk about squeamish.
Rhys: yes. She’s like, why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you? And then she notices, oh, there’s a puncture hole in the back, in his back, and it matches his hiking stick. So she gets up and just walks around the corner and her sister is sitting there on the floor of the kitchen [00:48:00] playing video games again inappropriately because she’s not,
Stephen: playing video games, not the way she’s holding that controller.
Rhys: she’s got blood all around her mouth and Justine puts the point of the walking stick on her forehead, contemplates just giving it that push and then
Stephen: that would’ve to be a pretty significant push for the forehead.
Rhys: she cut someone’s finger off with a pair of scissors.
Stephen: True, but she weighs like 90 pounds.
Rhys: But instead she spares her sister and takes her and cleans her up. And in the next scene we see that she has been, her sister is incarcerated now for the murder of Adrian Justine’s back eating with her folks. It turns out that this weird thing, she comes by naturally ’cause her mother leaves and her father is pointing out that, he, they met when they were in college and her mother didn’t really have a lot of friends and she pushed away from [00:49:00] him. And then eventually accepted him. And then he like unbuttons his shirt and he’s just covered with scars all over his chest from his wife chewing on him over the years
Stephen: were in love from the first bite,
Rhys: and roll credits. And that is raw.
Stephen: Good movies, like a good book or whatever, will sometimes leave the, that room for you to discuss afterwards. What do you think about this? What do you think was happening here? And, and a long good discussion, not just a, oh, I really like that battle scene. You know what I’m saying?
This is so it’s wait a minute. Are, is she trying to say that this is what happens if you go from vegetarian to eating meat? Is that the message or is it, look what happens when you go to college kids. There, there could be multiple messages here. You gotta wonder.
Rhys: It’s true. So there are scenes that certainly merit further discussion, like the whole thing with the horse, going into [00:50:00] surgery and then running, and then there’s this odd scene of this dog corpse that just pops up in between two cuts and the whole thing with everybody waking up and walking around outside from being sleeping under bridges and stuff.
Stephen: That was the, that’s when they sounded the bullhorn or whatever to signal the end of being newbies.
Rhys: The end of the hazing.
Stephen: yeah. Which, it, it’s not like you never walk through campus and find people sleeping on the ground ’cause they passed out, so that’s what I took that one to be.
Rhys: But overall, I think, and I’m, I might be stretching here, but it seems to me that the kind of theme here, just told in a very horrific manner is that all of the flaws and the traits of our parents, our, that as we are growing up and we hate and we swear we will not become, we eventually end up becoming
Stephen: Yeah. That’s a much deeper [00:51:00] thinking than I did.
Rhys: I had to do something to get over the pulling a flesh off my teeth.
Stephen: Yes.
Rhys: It wasn’t it’s realistic enough to not be entertaining in my. My point of view. So you can watch neither the living dead and yeah, the zombies are there eating nras. You look at it, you’re like, that’s just raw liver.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: it’s, when she bites her cheek and like rips that chunk out, you’re like, ow. Yeah. I can almost envision with that. Must be like,
Stephen: And that’s a true statement, what you said about channeling. ’cause Colin has looked at me a couple and says, okay, Papa. ’cause he is you’re acting just like your father. So I’ve actually had a couple good times when I’ve said, oh wow. You’re being me. Thank you.
You’re channeling me this time. He’s oh, shut up. Yeah I see that.
Rhys: yeah if you’re looking for a new French extremist film that doesn’t make you wanna sl slice your wrists open at the end. This is a good example. [00:52:00] It’s grim. It’s in your face. It’s over the top with their detail that they get into, they show you everything. But overall the tone of the movie is not so nihilistic that,
Stephen: Yeah it’s very much on the surface the horrific stuff. Whereas martyrs was like a deep down gut punch. But both of them horrific in their own way. Extremely horrific. Totally different. Some people may think this is way worse than martyrs ’cause it’s all, right there seeing it.
And that’s harder to handle for a lot of people.
Rhys: Yeah. Like I said, it wasn’t the subject matter that disturbed me so much about this movie. It was the actual scenes, it was the gore. Oddly enough, in this film that got to me.
Stephen: It was very in your face and very detailed.
Rhys: Yeah. And so that’s, that’s my, that was my whole thing when I was debating between this and Titan. It was like this story, straightforward.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: There’s no sex scenes with cars where [00:53:00] you’re like, what? There’s not this giant parsing to do this. It was a pretty straightforward story.
And if you wanna bring things to it oh, it’s this talking about us turning into our parents you can do that. That’s pretty straightforward. As opposed to watching somebody break their nose so they can pass as a boy something else entirely.
Stephen: Yeah. We, hey, if you want body horror, there’s plenty of it around.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: so what’s on the next agenda there? Rece?
Rhys: So we’re going back to, the old criticism for after season one of us not doing much in the way of American cinema. A lot of these are foreign. But the next one is an American film pretty recent. It’s called The Wind.
Stephen: The, oh yeah, this one was actually on my list before it appeared on our list.
Rhys: This movie is 110%. Write up Steve’s alley.
Stephen: Alright. I can’t wait to watch it then.
Rhys: Yep.
Stephen: Okay, man. There’s season one, [00:54:00] episode one in the books. We got it.
Rhys: Or Season six, episode one, whichever.
Stephen: Yeah. Whichever, don’t listen to me. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m on vacation this week. I just do this ’cause it’s more fun than some of my vacation.
Rhys: There you go. See you, Steve.
