You may not have thought it possible, but with Titane, writer-director Julia Ducournau amps up the aggressiveness and audacity even beyond Raw, her veterinarian-cannibal debut. This story—about a damaged and damaging young woman named Alexia (Agathe Rouselle) who evades the police by posing as a man who went missing years ago, when he was a boy—feels a bit more calculated in its provocations than Raw (the ghoulishness there was more organically volcanic). But there are still plenty of ideas to justify the stomach-churning images. Body horror is even more of a theme this time around, as well as an uncomfortable combination of sexuality and violence; the movie’s likely patron saints are David Cronenberg and Claire Denis. Rouselle is a willing model—the film mostly treats her body as an experimental art installation—but Vincent Lindon (a veteran of Denis’ Friday Night) gives an unsparing performance as the father of the missing boy and the captain of a suburban firefighting unit. After taking Alexia in and convincing himself that she is the now-grown Adrien, he claws his way through his own trauma and tries to offer Alexia a life-saving alternative to the life-taking existence she had been mired in. That’s about all I can say without giving too much away. Ducournau’s insistence on taking this scenario to unimaginable extremes may occasionally distance us from the humanity she’s also clearly interested in, but there’s no denying that her handling of craft and form—particularly the way the reddish-pink glow of a fire-truck’s flashing light filters much of the imagery—is masterful. I’m eager, with clenched teeth, to see where she goes from here.
