Best Horror Movies of the Decade: Raw

All this month, we are counting down the 31 best horror movies of the decade and taking a closer look at why each one earned a spot on our list!
6. Raw (dir. Julia Ducournau, 2016)I’m a fair-weather horror fan. I always enjoy when I sit down to watch, but it’s never been my number one genre when I sit down to watch a movie. I’m not a big fan of “bump in the night” horror. Movies that attempt to shock you with loud noises and jump scares. I find them cheap, even though they get me Every. Single. Time. I generally don’t get grossed out by things. The Saw movies make me giggle.
Raw made me want to barf.
The film, written and directed by Julia Ducournau, in a masterful debut, follows Justine (Garance Marillier) a young vegetarian in her first year at veterinary school. Everybody in Justine’s family is a strict vegetarian. While attending vet school, Justine is bullied by her older sister (Ella Rumpf) and participates in a hazing ceremony involving eating raw meat. From that moment, her appetite for flesh grows and grows.
Raw is punk as shit. It’s shot beautifully and stylistically, however stays rooted in the concept of learning who you are at your core beyond familial expectations, education, lifestyle choices, and dietary restrictions. It takes these big concepts and filters it down to a gorgeous horror film that is much more accessible than what these large concepts look like in text form.

Raw is deeply Feminist without being overtly FEMINIST. The film revolves around two sisters who are fully realized humans grappling with real identity issues. Identity issues such as losing your virginity, peer pressure, living up to a family legacy, and disordered eating in the form of an insatiable appetite for human flesh. It grapples with accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly inside all of us.
As the hungry sisters, Garance Marillier and Ella Rumpf are sensational. Despite the heightened circumstances of the movie, they remain rooted in realism and truthfulness. You care about Justine and Alexia, which makes their journey and competitive nature so much harder to watch. 
Raw is also one of those movies that has such a shockingly good twist at the end, you need to watch the film again to catch hints you missed throughout. It’s not a twist that cheapens the movie or makes you feel cheated because you just invested time and energy into this film and the twist undercuts that time and energy. Instead, it deepens the film. It’s okay to sacrifice a large chunk of yourself to love somebody. The ones we love will take a chunk out of us, regardless. We might as well volunteer that chunk. 
Watch it twice, if you dare.
Stray thoughts:

• I watched this film on an airplane on my way to Las Vegas. The person next to me was eating a donut, looked over at my iPad at a particularly gruesome moment (hint: finger), slowly put down his donut and didn’t take another bite.
  
• I purposefully didn’t go into much detail. The joy of watching this movie is the shock of it. It’s beautiful and disturbing and so exciting. Enjoy.
  

See the entire list here.

Re-post from Cinema76.com