The slow deterioration in Julia Ducournau's Raw

Julia Ducournau’s Raw begins with the controlled discomfort of a university initiation and gradually slips into something much more disturbing. Justine, a lifelong vegetarian entering veterinary school, is forced to eat meat during a hazing ritual. The act seems like a single violation of her principles, yet it opens a physical and psychological appetite that steadily reshapes her identity.

The film’s horror is built through accumulation rather than constant shocks. Ducournau allows embarrassment, hunger, rivalry and family history to contaminate one another until Justine’s deterioration feels inevitable. Beneath the blood and body horror, Raw becomes a coming-of-age story about desire without limits, and the frightening cost of discovering what has been suppressed.

A campus built on humiliation

Justine’s arrival at veterinary school places her inside an environment where cruelty is treated as tradition. Older students control the newcomers through chants, costumes, dares and forced consumption. The rituals have a recognisable social logic: submission is demanded first, while friendship and belonging are offered as rewards later.

That atmosphere may resonate differently for Australian viewers familiar with university residential colleges, orientation-week excess or the uneasy divide between harmless initiation and coercive behaviour. The film’s French campus is not an Australian institution, but its social machinery feels familiar. Group pressure turns private discomfort into public entertainment, making Justine ashamed of refusing and ashamed of participating.

The body becomes the battleground

Ducournau treats Justine’s body as a changing landscape. Rash, blood, raw flesh and sudden cravings are photographed with an intimacy that makes the horror feel tactile. The camera does not keep the viewer safely outside the transformation; it stays close to skin, wounds, hair and mouths.

This visual approach gives the film its queasy power. A bite or scrape is never merely a special-effect moment. Each injury suggests that Justine’s body is communicating a truth her conscious mind cannot accept. Her physical deterioration is also a collapse of the boundaries she has been taught to maintain: vegetarian and carnivore, sister and rival, innocent and predator.

Hunger as inherited knowledge

The film’s cannibalism is connected to family history rather than presented as an isolated curse. Justine’s mother and older sister Alexia both understand more than they initially reveal. Their household has created the impression that appetite can be managed through discipline, but the family’s apparent normality hides a much darker arrangement.

Alexia is especially important because she offers Justine a distorted model of adulthood. She is confident, sexual, competitive and already experienced in navigating their shared secret. Her behaviour suggests that survival may depend on mastering the appetite rather than eliminating it, even when that mastery requires emotional numbness.

The sisterly relationship

Justine and Alexia are bound together by resentment, affection and competition. Their relationship gives the film much of its emotional charge because neither sister fits neatly into the role of victim or villain. Alexia intimidates Justine, yet she also recognises the transformation taking place inside her.

The rivalry becomes inseparable from bodily horror. A childhood bond is expressed through teasing, aggression and mutual testing, while moments of tenderness are constantly threatened by appetite. Ducournau understands that family intimacy can be invasive: the people closest to us know precisely where to press, what to expose and what we would rather keep hidden.

Desire without a safe outlet

Justine’s hunger is erotic, social and biological at once. Her awkward relationship with Adrien complicates the transformation, since attraction and aggression begin to overlap. The film refuses to separate teenage sexual awakening from the grotesque sensations spreading through her body.

This is where Raw differs from a straightforward monster narrative. Justine is not simply infected by an external force. She is discovering impulses that may have always been present, then learning that desire can produce pleasure and disgust within the same moment. Her deterioration comes from losing the ability to pretend that she is untouched by those impulses.

Sound, colour and disorientation

The film’s atmosphere depends heavily on sound. Chewing, footsteps, wet surfaces, sudden silences and abrasive music make ordinary spaces feel unstable. The soundtrack often anticipates the image, warning that something is wrong before Justine or the viewer can identify the threat.

Colour also shifts with her condition. Clinical whites and institutional greens evoke the controlled world of veterinary training, while red appears with increasing force as appetite breaks through restraint. The cinematography turns corridors, bathrooms and dormitory rooms into pressure chambers. Even a brightly lit space can feel dangerous because the danger is lodged inside Justine rather than waiting in the dark.

For Australian audiences encountering the film through late-night streaming or a festival screening in Melbourne or Sydney, that sensory design can be especially effective. A familiar viewing habit—watching unsettling films alone after midnight—allows the smallest noises to become part of the experience. The horror has room to linger after the credits.

A difficult film in the local market

Raw occupies an interesting place in Australia’s genre culture. Its mixture of art-house style, coming-of-age drama and graphic body horror suits festivals such as Melbourne’s Monster Fest, where films can be appreciated as both extreme entertainment and serious cinema. It also sits awkwardly between categories in the broader streaming market, where viewers often expect horror to announce its rules immediately.

Australian classification law matters here. A film containing intense cannibalistic imagery, blood and sexualised violence is likely to receive an R18+ classification, restricting access for younger viewers and shaping where it can be screened or promoted. That legal framework does not explain the film, but it influences how an Australian audience encounters it, whether through a licensed platform, a cinema program or a late-night rental.

The film’s lasting impact comes from how quietly its transformation advances. Justine does not wake up as a completed monster; she becomes someone who can no longer return to the person she was performing. Her deterioration is slow because every boundary breaks through a small compromise, a moment of curiosity or a need to belong.

That makes Raw more unsettling than a simple tale of supernatural appetite. Ducournau suggests that growing up involves discovering urges that cannot be made entirely respectable. Justine’s tragedy is not that she has desire, but that the people around her have taught her to hide it until it can only emerge as violence.

Watch Raw with attention to its textures, silences and recurring images rather than treating it as a sequence of shocks. Then share your reading of Justine’s transformation and the film’s cannibalistic family history with other genre fans at A Nightmare On Samityville Street.