Raw

• Raw premiered in the Critics' Week section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize.
• At a Midnight Madness screening during the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, two audience members reportedly fainted and paramedics were called, with one person taken to a hospital; the film's next screening (at Scotiabank Theatre) went off without incident.
• Actress Garance Marillier, who plays vegetarian-turned-carnivore Justine, is not actually a vegetarian in real life - she's said she doubts she'll ever give up eating meat.
• Director Julia Ducournau favored practical effects over CGI for the film's gore, including prosthetics for the scene where Justine eats her sister Alexia's severed finger.

The cannibalism reads as a literalized puberty narrative. Justine's body betrays her, her appetites reshape her social standing, and her relationship with Alexia mirrors the violent renegotiation of sibling hierarchy that adulthood forces. The kidney is the catalyst the way a first period is a catalyst: not the cause but the unlock.

The film functions as a veiled critique of institutional hazing and the way elite institutions breed monstrosity. The veterinary school's traditions don't just tolerate cruelty—they manufacture it. Justine's hunger is the logical endpoint of a system that already treats bodies as consumable.

The family's reveal in the final dinner scene reframes the entire film as an inheritance story - the father bares old bite scars, confirming the appetite runs in the family through the mother. Justine's hunger isn't a mutation or a punishment but a genetic legacy, suggesting the real horror is not the hunger itself but the family's decision to suppress it and let their daughters discover it through trauma.

Justine arrives at veterinary school a lifelong vegetarian, her older sister Alexia already hardened by the same hazing rituals that now await her. A forced ritual bite of raw rabbit kidney cracks something open. What begins as an itchy rash spirals into an insatiable hunger that her body seems to have been waiting for. As Justine's appetites sharpen between flesh and flesh, she tears through the gap between who she was raised to be and what she actually is. Family secrets bleed out at the worst possible moments.