2017 will always be the year of my favorite coming-of-age movies. And while I am a huge fan of Lady Bird, I don’t think it can compete with Thelma or Raw. Two far more exciting tales of young women coming into themselves and adulthood.
Thelma, co-written and directed by Joachim Trier, and Raw, written and directed by Julia Ducournau, both bring together the horror genre and the coming-of-age story. As horror films, both Thelma and Raw make the monstrous feminine the focal point of their coming-of-age stories. Mixing classical horror conventions with stories that focus on the development of their female protagonists. The monstrous feminine, as theorized by Barbara Creed, describes a monster whose monstrosity is inherently tied to both her femininity and her sexuality.
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In a patriarchal society, women are almost always considered sex objects first, and people second. As opposed to classic male movie (and literary) monsters. Whose monstrosity is generally not tied to their gender or their sexuality (which is always a default assumed heterosexuality), monstrous women in film are often monstrous precisely because of some aspect of their femininity.
Because a woman with agency is frightening to patriarchal order and power, a woman who has her own active sexual desire and is not merely an object for men, may be perceived as a threat, or a monster. Creed forwards two broad categories for the monstrous feminine, one connected to woman’s “mothering and reproductive functions” and one “linked more directly to questions of sexual desire.” As coming-of-age tales, Raw and Thelma, are stories of the second type.
Both films begin with cold opens that immediately place them firmly within the horror genre, and set their audiences on edge. Raw opens with a static wide shot of a road. We see a mysterious figure leap out in front of a fast approaching car, forcing the car to veer off the road and crash into a tree. The figure then stands up, brushes itself off, and begins walking over to the car as the film abruptly cuts to the all caps RAW title.
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In Thelma’s opening, there is no violence, but the threat of it may be more unnerving. We see a man hunting deer with his young daughter, and as they come across a deer, he lifts his rifle and aims. Standing behind his daughter, he tells her to be quiet, and slowly turns his aim from the deer in the distance to the back of the child’s head. Again, the film abruptly cuts to the title, this time with a strobe effect.
The two films follow in the footsteps of Ginger Snaps (2000) and Carrie (1976), both of which take place in high schools and focus more specifically on puberty (with Carrie literally beginning with Carrie’s first period). Raw’s protagonist, Justine, and Thelma’s titular Thelma, are a bit older, and the films begin with them at college. So we can assume that they’ve already gone through these changes. As such, their monstrous “awakenings,” are more related to their developing sexual agencies rather than the changes in their bodies.
The connection between Thelma’s sexuality and her telekinetic power is immediately made clear, as the first sign of this power occurs when the beautiful Anja sits next to Thelma in the library and a murder of crows begins slamming into the library window. In Raw, Justine’s desire for sex grows in tandem with her desire for raw meat. After having been a vegetarian her entire life, Justine is forced to eat a rabbit kidney as part of a hazing ritual at her veterinary school, awakening her in more ways than one to the pleasures of the flesh.
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While Justine has her vegetarianism, Thelma has her Christianity. Both characters have lived by strict moral codes that immediately make them outsiders in their new social worlds. But they each find solace in fellow classmates. For Thelma, it is Anja who befriends her early, sensing that Thelma might not have the greatest social skills. For Justine, it is her roommate Adrien, with whom she bonds after they are literally thrown out of their room by upperclassmen on their first night at school.
As the films progress, their narratives diverge. Thelma becomes a romance with touches of the supernatural. While Raw shows us Justine’s growing hunger for meat, and her developing relationships with Adrien and her sister Alexia, who is a year older and a fellow student. We learn that Thelma’s parents have her class schedule memorized, want to check in with her every day, and guilt her if she calls them back too late at night. On the other hand, Justine’s parents seemed so excited to drop her off at school that they left her standing alone in a parking lot after Alexia didn’t show up to greet her little sister.
Both stories have significant turning points accentuated by great score work that specify their heroines’ monstrosity, and what this monstrosity means thematically (some spoilers ahead). In Raw, the turning point comes when Alexia insists that Justine have a bikini wax, which Alexia gleefully administers herself. Through what I’ll call hijinks, Alexia’s middle finger is cut off in the process. Justine pushes Alexia’s dog out of the way to grab the finger, looking for ice to place it in so that it might be reattached. But as she holds the finger and blood drips down it, she’s overcome by her now insatiable craving and begins to lap up the blood like melting ice cream, before biting in as the score switches from playful and acoustic to dark and electronic.
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In Thelma, we see Thelma’s desires come to fruition when Anja invites her to a dance performance. Sitting in the theater, Anja holds Thelma’s hand, then begins to caress her thigh as the diegetic music from the show builds, growing louder and louder and more and more percussive. We see one of Thelma’s hands begin to shake and a massive light fixture above the audience swaying as Thelma struggles to control her desire and power. Overwhelmed, she runs out to the coat room, where Anja finds her. The two kiss passionately, but Thelma can’t take it. When she again runs away from Anja (and her own queer desire), she finds a place to put her head against a wall and prays “save me from these thoughts.”
This prayer highlights the thematic divide between the films. Thelma is concerned with Thelma’s repression at the hands of her parents. While Raw is about Justine’s becoming hedonistic after being set free from her parents’ imposed vegetarianism and being awakened to her own fleshly desires. The two protagonists’ monstrosity goes hand in hand with their development into young women with agency. And in their explorations of these themes, the two films move farther into the horror genre.
Thelma’s horror is almost all atmospheric. Trier uses classic horror point of view shots in a variety of ways. Showing us that Anja feels a presence when Thelma is thinking of her, and that Thelma’s parents are ever watchful, giving us the feeling that they are spying on her. In one sequence, Trier frames Thelma in the corner of the screen kneeling with her head against a wall as her father sits behind her, looming over her in the frame as she prays.
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Raw’s brand of horror is much more violent. After Alexia is let out of the hospital (and some jokes about being middlefingerless) she immediately takes Justine to the road we saw in the opening. Here we learn that this is Alexia’s preferred method for satisfying her own cannibalistic cravings. The sequence focuses on Justine throughout, we see her face as Alexia runs into the middle of the road and we hear a diverted car slam into something.
Ducournau’s camera then slowly brings us to witness the aftermath of the crash. Two bloodied young men, one dead, one barely breathing, sit in the front seat of the car. We then see Justine look away in the foreground of the screen and in a blur behind her, Alexia takes a bite of the still living man before turning to Justine to tell her that he won’t make it and inviting her to take part.
This scene in Raw sets up the counterpoint to Justine’s navigation of her newly discovered cannibalistic hunger. Unlike Thelma, who must push against the repressive power of her parents, Justine must find a way to satiate her hunger without harming innocent people. The way that Alexia does by doing whatever gets her her next bite. It’s at this time that Justine decides to combine her two hungers. She begins biting those that she’s physically intimate with.
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After experimenting with biting her partners and having sex for the first time, Justine goes on the hunt. Unlike her sister, she uses a party as her hunting ground. Justine’s behavior at this party contrasts with the first party that she and Adrien were thrown into after being yanked from their room.
At that first party, Justine was overwhelmed by the chaos of dancing bodies, flashing lights, and blaring music. Now she surveys the dance floor like a hunter, literally licking her lips as she looks over the crowd. When she enters the throng of dancers, she looks everyone up and down before finally making a (rather forward) move by slamming her body into a young man and kissing him. When the young man’s date pulls her off, Justine kisses her, but sadly this doesn’t work out either.
Here we learn that Justine has an omnivorous sexual appetite and is thus also queer. We may think that Justine’s queerness is tied to her monstrous cannibalism, that she simply wants to get her hands on and her teeth into an appetizing specimen of any gender. While Thelma’s queerness does not seem necessarily tied to her supernatural powers, the fact of her queerness is not at all incidental. Queer women are perceived as more monstrous and threatening to the partriarchal order than heterosexual women because queer women don’t need men to participate in their sexuality.
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Ultimately each young woman’s ability emphasizes the themes of their stories. Thelma’s telekinetic power is a power of the mind and her journey is one out of the repressive mental prison that her parents have built for her. Justine’s hunger is entirely bodily, she lusts after whoever might satisfy her but she must navigate how to indulge that hunger without becoming uncaring about life like her sister.
Justine’s quest for balance highlights how both films engage their high concept ideas in ways that remain grounded in reality. There’s certainly a version of Raw in which Justine goes out and uses her sexuality to lure boys back to her room to chow down on them. Just as there’s a version of Thelma where Thelma becomes a violent avenger for other women and queer people facing repression.
To be fair, I’d probably enjoy these movies as well, but they wouldn’t have the same thematic and emotional heft. The commitment to play these premises straight with subtle but powerful accents of horror filmmaking brings a sense of authenticity to the horror. Rendering monstrous femininity literal while exploring the emotional and social realities that create the monstrous feminine as a category. While both films certainly belong to the horror genre, they’re also the two best coming-of-age films I’ve ever seen.