The car puns are turned to eleven with Raw director Julia Ducournau‘s latest shocker, Titane (acquired by NEON), which just premiered at the ongoing Cannes festival to a mixed-bag of reviews.

The program says the plot follows a series of unexplained crimes where a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years.

That’s an understatement as the reviews for the film promise a head-turning shocker “about a serial killer who has sex with a car.” (IndieWire)

“It’s a daringly queer and undoubtedly controversial ride, resulting in a most uncommon monster movie — a cross between David Cronenberg’s Crash and the uterine horrors of Takashi Miike’s Gozu,” writes Variety‘s Peter Dubruge, who adds: “Julia Ducournau dares to challenge the boundaries of sexuality and taste with this bulletproof, nothing-to-lose body-horror shocker.”

Mega spoiler warning from TheWrap‘s Ben Croll, who offers up a taste of the nasty first ten minutes: “A car crash, an up-close shot of open-cranium surgery, neon-lit car show girls twerking and grinding in hot pants, body modification, body scarification, girl-on-girl-flirtation, girl on-girl-copulation, girl-on-machine-copulation, boobs, bums, blood and barf, and about five gruesome murders.”

He continues: “Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw is more than comfortable in its genre trappings, offering grab bag nods to past masters and positively delighting in sex, violence and grisly prosthetics as it chants ‘Long live the new flesh’ from the film world’s toniest perch, inviting all gathered to join along.”

Vice calls it “a new gory masterpiece” and to “prepare for carnage,” while IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich adds: “Ducournau follows Raw with one of the wildest films to ever screen at Cannes.”

On the other spectrum of the car puns, The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw calls it “a car cash…with occasional yucky flair.” He injects that Ducournau “is doing the same thing [as Raw], but more facetiously and clumsily – if occasionally with a certain bizarre elan.”

The Hollywood Reporter calls the film a “brash and ballsy experiment,” adding that in Titane, “there are elements of body horror, female revenge films and pedal-to-the-metal car-obsessed movies.” Deadline adds: “Titane is ambitious, and not quite in Raw’s league, but it’s never dull.”

But really… here’s all I need to know:

Things I saw last night with TITANE are now burned into my memory and my anxious mind seems unable to think of anything else.

Holy Hell, that movie is deliciously dark and absolutely bonkers. #Cannes

— 🍅Jacqueline🍅 is @ #CANNES (@THATJacqueline) July 14, 2021