Watching this film with my pregnant friend was not a good idea. We stopped it halfway and I resumed later, on my own, on my laptop. A year later, it still troubled me so much that I suggested it for my family Horror Movie Club.
A year after that, here I am, still thinking about Titane.
This 2021 film from director Julia Ducournau is a punchy, avant-garde follow-up to her 2016 film Raw. This lurid body horror slasher is perhaps unlikable but certainly unforgettable. It’s also very, very queer.
And very, very weird.
Sex-with-a-car weird.
What’s the deal?
Let’s give it a shot, for the people of the internet.
Alexia is a serial killer. We meet her on the night of a killing spree at a car show that concludes with the aforementioned sexual act. She finds out that she is pregnant when motor oil starts to come out of her vagina.
Wanted for molto murders, Alexia changes her appearance and claims to be Adrien, a child who went missing a decade ago. Adrien’s father Vincent takes her in.
As Alexia’s pregnancy begins to show, the depths of Vincent’s denial and self-delusion become apparent. He helps Alexia/Adrien give birth to a half-car, half-human baby covered in patches of titanium. Alexia dies during childbirth, and Vincent promises to raise the baby.
I can’t stop thinking about...
This movie pulls off a simultaneous intimacy and isolation; both a dearness and an incredible distance.
There is no doubt that Alexia is unrelatable and unlikable. She isn’t entirely human, according to Ducarnau, but the viewer still expects her to be.
I’ve used the word “unlikable” twice now. This movie is challenging to watch, hard to crack. It resists our projection and even our most basic understanding.
We don’t have access to Alexia’s thoughts and motivations. The logic around her extreme actions is opaque, bordering on random, but with an internal consistency of violence: it is distancing.
And yet, the relationship between Alexia and Vincent is one of grief and loneliness, a desire for connection. This we can understand; within these fragile scenes, there is some redemption for Titane.
Amid the ultraviolence and carnage, these are two people who have met for a moment and chosen to care for one another — or at least not to kill one another.
This movie is ugly. It’s full of ugliness and hateful people, but it offers up moments of sincere beauty. Whether that beauty is enough to balance the scales, it’s not for me to say.
But I would definitely watch this movie again.
Yours,
Horrorshow Jane