Movies
Paramedics Called to Rescue ‘Raw’ Viewer at Toronto Premiere
A late movie on a Monday doesn’t scream drama but last night at the Toronto International Film Festival emergency lights were flashing on the red carpet at Midnight Madness.
The International Premiere of Raw proved too much for one viewer with an ambulance called to assist in the fallout from the French cannibal film. Here’s how things went down along with some reactions from the screening on social media.
Details in the programming note shed some light on the plot and Olivier Afonso’s involvement (À l’intérieur) make it clear that we are going to have something grizzly to digest. Encore screenings in Toronto continue Tuesday and Saturday before the film travels to Fantastic Fest, Mayhem Film Festival, Celluloid Screams, Beyond Fest and Sitges Film Festival.
A shy, vegetarian student at a veterinary college develops an insatiable lust for flesh as the result of a gruesome hazing ritual, in this grisly and gory tale of a cannibalistic coming of age.
From the country that gave us steak tartare comes a grisly tale of female sexuality and cannibalism.
Shy 16-year-old Justine (Garance Marillier) is following in the footsteps of her entire family when she enrols at veterinary college, where she finds herself in the shadow of her distant and dismissive older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf ). To make matters worse, she is thrown into the humiliating traditions of the school’s wild and vicious hazing rituals. A strict vegetarian like her parents, Justine is confronted with a moral dilemma when she must eat a raw rabbit liver as part of an initiation rite. She overcomes her revulsion and devours the meat — and immediately her life starts to go haywire. An angry rash develops all over her body. She is overtaken by unusual cravings. Her shy demeanour is broken by aggressive outbursts.
Something is very, very wrong with Justine. Barely equipped to handle the changes taking place in her mind and body, she has a gruelling internal battle to fight, while an escalating conflict with her sister leads to a gruesome showdown.
Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s first feature is impressively lean and confident, grounded by Marillier’s ferocious performance. Ducournau always knows where she’s leading her hungry protagonist, and she punctuates the tense coming-of-age story with moments of brutality and gore. The outcome may prove disturbing even for seasoned horror fans, thanks to the work of French FX master Olivier Afonso (who was also responsible for Midnight Madness favourite À l’intérieur). Raw is a bold and bloody exploration of womanhood.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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