Before I get to the review, I want to compliment whoever made the trailer for RAW. When I first saw it in the theater before watching Logan, I knew I had to see this film. Not one word of dialogue in the trailer. Just music, visuals and a lot of red.
Right? Honestly, that’s a better review than I can give it. Just go see the movie.
Since watching that trailer (and hearing the buzz coming out of Fantastic Fest 2016), I had been looking forward to watching Raw for awhile now and, man, it did not disappoint. We are still early into 2017 but it is, so far, one of the best movies I’ve seen so far. I really dug everything about it.
Raw doesn’t waste any time making the viewer feel uncomfortable: the music, the awkward lunch scene with the parents and the immediate hazing of the new college students sets up for a wild, disturbing, beautiful blood-soaked coming-of-age tale. (The Drafthouse provided our advanced screening crowd with barf bags … a dumb, but telling, promo.)
“A wild, disturbing, beautiful blood-soaked coming-of-age tale.”
So … is this film like Saw or Hostel? No. It’s not torture porn and there really aren’t as many violent scenes as some of the pull quotes from other articles (or the barf bags) suggest. But the scenes of violence that do happen are twisted and have a point. Nothing just happens for pure shock value: a story is being told and everything has a purpose.
In one of the more shocking scenes that I won’t spoil here, the audience definitely suspects what’s about to happen. But when it actually does, it’s so shocking to actually see the entire audience gasped at the same time. The person next to me had her hand over her mouth during the entire scene, not to mention the entire movie.
I watch a lot of horror movies so I didn’t get sick or feel the need to throw up but I can see how someone could easily feel squeamish. It is a movie about cannibalism so expect some pretty disturbing stuff to go down. When you finish watching, it feels like you just woke up from a twisted nightmare that has an amazing score, solid acting and one hell of an ending.
I can’t wait to revisit this film. Go see it (and bring your own barf bag from home).
Rating:
TFW when @theyliveobey gets us. ? #RAWmovie pic.twitter.com/gbrpNB0JW0
— RawMovie (@RawMovie) March 25, 2017
