Grave (2017)
Directed by Julia Ducournau

Film Review

The traumas of growing up are given a fresh perspective in this enticingly off-kilter debut film from director Julia Ducournau.  Living up to both its French and English language titles (Grave and Raw respectively), this odd flight of fantasy offers a canny twist on the classic coming-of-age-drama by taking a look at the phenomenon of teen angst through the prism of the cannibalistic gore movie.  Ducournau clearly isn't interested in churning out cheap exploitation thrills - the horror content in Grave is pretty minimal compared with what we have thrown in our faces from most of today's full-on gore fests, and much of it seems to be more for darkly comical rather than dramatic effect.  Instead, what the 33-year-old French film director sets out to do is to remind us just how painful and disorientating the transition from childhood to adulthood can be, using a teenager's supposed vampiric transformation as a succinct metaphor for the real-life ordeal that is every bit as unnerving for any adolescent coping with the physical and psychological changes that accompany puberty.

It's a bold and imaginative tour de force for a confident young filmmaker who previously has directed just one short and one other racy feature for French television, both also on the theme of metamorphosis.  Ducournau makes no secret of the fact that she has been strongly influenced by the films of David Cronenberg, notably Shivers (1975), but rather than merely imitating this master of the body horror genre, she takes on board some of Cronenberg's better ideas and develops from these her own very distinctive film aesthetic, one that is recognisably French and yet also eerily unfamiliar - like a dream that refuses to accept it is a dream but can't convince us that it is reality either.  Uncomfortably suspended in the twilight half-and-half space between deranged fantasy and real world experience, Grave has its own peculiar poetry that makes it one of the most fascinating excursions for French cinema into the horror genre since Georges Franju's equally singular Les Yeux sans visages (1960).

Playing the unfortunate 16-year-old afflicted not only with the excruciating pangs of adolescence but also a hereditary disorder that gives her the urge to make a meal of her bedfellows, Garance Marillier has an instant impact in her first substantial screen role.  The actress's child-like innocence is frighteningly at odds with the viscerally gruesome experiences her character has to cope with, and yet whilst it is easy to identify with her, there is something deeply unsettling about her portrayal.  In a few memorably blood-curdling shots, the evil that is slowly taking possession of Justine is terrifyingly apparent, just from the look in her eyes and the deathly stillness in her expression.  The contrast between Marillier and Ella Rumpf, who plays the older sister, is striking.  Having none of her co-star's apparent vulnerability and goofy innocence, Rumpf exudes a quiet, cold malevolence that is genuinely unnerving.  She is the stuff of nightmares, skulking in the shadows like a female Nosferatu on heat, and like all good villains she turns out to be far worse than we imagine.

One of the strengths of the film is that Ducournau endows it with just enough ambiguity for us to interpret Justine's journey into hell as both an actual physical transformation (from a cute little baa-lamb into a lustful flesh-eating vampire) and the deranged fantasy of a totally mixed-up teenager.  One sequence near the film's midpoint (which loops back to the enigmatic 'hook' opening) sees Justine being invited to partake of a road-side meal that her sister has arranged for her, by calmly stepping into the road and killing a motorist.  The curiously detached way in which this sequence is constructed and the fact that it is repeated leave you convinced it is a fragment of dream.  What is so strange is that, after seeing it, everything that follows has a heightened sense of reality, even though you are more conscious of the dreamlike nature of narrative.  This creepily oneiric duality is reinforced by Jim Williams' score and Ruben Impens' photography, both taking a lurch into Gothic excess whenever horror bursts through the vague illusion of normality.

Whilst the two weird sisters' eating habits are likely to turn a few stomachs (aware of the vomit-inducing potential of certain scenes, some theatres in the United States took the precaution of issuing spectators with sick bags), what is perhaps more shocking is the film's representation of student life at a supposedly respectable educational establishment in (presumably) Belgium.  The early part of the film shows freshers being subjected to the most degrading and inhumane treatment by their elder students, showered with gallons of animal blood at their induction ceremony and then forced to eat raw meat.  Far from being a happy and supportive student community, what Ducournau presents is something more akin to an extreme form of totalitarian régime, where those in authority (the older students) use their power to control and subjugate their juniors with a staggering lack of restraint and humanity.  The early scenes showing the bemused freshers being rounded up in the middle of the night and corralled like sheep towards their first round of do-this-or-else induction carry chilling echoes of the abattoir and the Holocaust.

Far from being a freakish aberration, Justine's vampiric exploits look increasingly like a heroic act of defiance, an individual asserting her right to be a free-thinking, autonomous entity rather than a mindless sheep.  Force people to be vegetarians and you're bound to end up with cannibals - that seems to be the film's overriding message.  At the climax of the film, when Justine's conversion is all but complete, we flinch when we see what has become of her peers.  They are reduced to ranks of mindless zombies, blindly roaming about the university campus in a scene that is spookily reminiscent of the finale of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978).  It is this haunting allusion to a society that has had all trace of individuality driven out of it that is most likely to stick in your memory, not the film's nervous dalliances with macabre gore fantasy.  As its title implies, Grave is a serious film with a grim subtext.  Not just an allegory of a teenager's coming to terms with her identity, it is also an eloquent indictment of where western society appears to be heading at the moment - increasingly narrow in its thinking, intolerant not only of outsiders but also of those within who break away from the crowd and dare to be different.

Film Synopsis

Like the rest of her well-educated, middle-class family, Justine is a committed vegetarian who would never dream of eating meat.  A gifted student, she is just 16 when she is admitted to a veterinary college where her older sister Alexia is already training to be a vet.  Justine's indoctrination into student life is harder than she had imagined and she cannot count on the support of her sister to make it any easier.  Luckily, she finds a sympathetic friend in her gay roommate, Adrien, with whom she develops a strong emotional bond.  As part of her freshers' initiation, Justine is forced against her will to eat a piece of raw meat.  Not long afterwards this brings on a violent allergic reaction that causes her skin to be marked by itchy red blotches.  Then she begins to experience an intense craving for meat that she has not known before.  Justine's feelings for Adrien develop into a powerful physical yearning as she undergoes a slow and painful inner transformation.  Her true nature is revealed to her when, after accidentally mutilating her sister, she has her first taste of human flesh.  Far from being shocked by Justine's odd behaviour Alexis goes out of her way to encourage it.  The girl's metamorphosis is proceeding exactly as it should...