by ·Comments Off on Alpha (2025, Julia Ducournau)

After a flashback scene with her drugged-out dad uncle, stoned teenage Alpha gets a tattoo at a drug party, then it won’t stop bleeding. She inevitably will catch the medusa virus going around that’s turning people to stone, but first she’s gonna become unstuck in time and live her past/present life with her troubled uncle.

I liked the range of weird tones in Titane, the dark humor in Raw – this one is all grim all the way, following lives of pure misery, and whenever something almost positive happens it gets interrupted. Didn’t I see another movie recently where the final shot was the poster image? Only Alpha and boyfriend Adrien and uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim of A Prophet) have character names, none for mom Golshifteh Farahani or nurse Ella McCay.

Sometimes the world vibrates and assaults Alpha. Her teacher (a Nocturama lead, above) has a boyfriend with the stone disease. Uncle Amin takes the girl for a dreamed night on the town to Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” but even in the dream he has fits, then vanishes. Mom tries to deal with Amin, helping him to live or to die. The boyfriend got the same tattoo (minus the constant bleeding) and didn’t tell anyone. Despite the big fantasy epidemic, the movie is mostly handheld-cam family/teen drama, and feels long.

by ·Comments Off on Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)

Before heading to the theater I checked the movie’s length on letterboxd, stopping to chuckle at their plot description about a fireman reuniting with his son, obviously a database glitch since everyone knows Titane is about a woman having sex with cars. But it’s both! Agathe Rousselle, obsessed with metal and fire, is hiding from the cops after a serial-murder spree, having killed at least five hot young people plus her parents, and decides to masquerade as the missing boy on a poster. Now her adoptive dad wants to bond with her, while she’s trying to hide the evidence that she’s been knocked up by a hot rod.

Movies do love to open with car crashes – good crash here, though I liked the Empty Man kid’s coin-on-teeth routine more than Young Agathe’s vroom sounds. After Annette and It Still Lives, this is my third mutant baby (titanium-spined cyborg) in a couple months, and after Videodrome and the Tsukamotos this has become a flesh-machine-themed week. Raw star Garance Marillier plays a friend/victim, and is again named Justine. In Raw, Justine’s sister was Alexia and her roommate was Adrien, and in Titane those are the two names Agathe goes by – something’s going on here. Alexia’s real dad is Bertrand Bonello, and in her new life she’s got Claire Denis regular Vincent Lindon as a dad and Dardenne regular Myriem Akeddiou for a mom.

The switch from car-humping icepick murderer to mute sullen teen firefighter is abrupt, but it works in the moment. Scott Tobias in The Reveal:

Its heroine’s body is stretched and mutated in Cronenberg fashion, and as she recedes ever more dramatically from social acceptability, Titane stirs intense alienation and loneliness. But a disarming sweetness sneaks its way into the film, too, as the conventional boundaries of gender and family are scrubbed away and a relationship defines its own terms.

by ·Comments Off on Raw (2016, Julia Ducournau)

Opens with someone in wide shot leaping from behind a tree in front of a car that swerves away and hits a tree, which is how the girls hunt for bloody victims at the end of the movie. But here at the beginning, it’s the youngest in a vegetarian family going off to veterinary college which is dominated by violent hazing rituals.

Justine rooms with Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella of Girlhood), follows after her older sister Alex, and quickly gives into meat temptation and stops eating veggies at all – then she eats sister’s finger, sister eats her roommate, and they have to hold a family meeting and figure out what’s going on. Dad who gives J a Teen Wolf speech is Laurent Lucas of two movies in that wave of French horrors 15 years ago.