Titane

Year:  2021

Director:  Julia Ducournau

Screenplay:  Julia Ducournau

Starring:  Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Laïs Salameh

Running Time:  108 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Alexia (Rousselle) is a dancer who has a titanium plate in her skull, following a car accident when she was a child.  Disturbingly obsessed by cars, she is also responsible for a series of murders.  After a particularly brutal killing spree, Alexia finds herself on the run, and hides out by disguising herself and posing as the missing son of fire captain Vincent (Lindon), whose son went missing ten years earlier aged seven.  Alexia's attempts to keep her disguise are further complicated by her advancing pregnancy, and a series of increasingly disturbing and bizarre symptoms.

French writer-director Julia Ducournau made something of a splash with her debut film, the cannibal horror film Raw (2016), and in this, her second film, really comes into her own as one of the most original and striking directors in modern horror.  This surreal and disturbing slice of body horror tips a hat to directors such as David Cronenberg (Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996)) and Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1987) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1991), but it really is it's own thing.  In her debut film role, journalist and model Agathe Rousselle gives a startling, and mostly dialogue free  performance as the serial killer with a car fetish, alternately terrifying and vulnerable.  Vincent Lindon is also impressive as the sometimes sympathetic and sometimes threatening fire captain who believes Alexia to be his missing son.  This is a tough film to watch at times, it's graphic and some scenes are genuinely shocking, but it is powerful and there are some beautiful as well as bizarre and nightmarish images that you might not be able to shake from your mind, however much you may want to.  There is some humanity and heart to the film and the characters, however terrible their actions, are treated with a degree of compassion, and the whole experience is emotional as well as shocking and disturbing.  

Agathe Rousselle in Titane