I Am Finally Ready To Talk About Titane

I am finally ready to talk about Titane.

It’s been the better part of a year since I saw Julia Ducournau’s body horror masterpiece, Titane, and ever since, I have been trying to wrap my head around exactly what I want to say about it. It’s the kind of film that comes into your home, flips over your coffee table, pets your cat, and changes the way your neurons fire in your brain forever onward – so strange, so different, so utterly bold and unique it sort of defies review.

But I’m going to give it a go, because it’s officially horror season (as far as I’m concerned), and it would be wrong of me not to make a case for you to watch one of the best and most inventive horror movies that’s come out of the genre in the last twenty years or so. If you’ve seen Ducournau’s breakthrough Raw, you’ll have some idea of what to expect, but Titane takes the brutality and surrealism to a whole new level.

Titane follows Alexia (Agathe Rouselle), a serial killer with a sexual frisson for various vehicles, as she goes on the run and hides herself as the missing son of a steroid-addicted firefighter (Victor Lindon). Confused yet? Good.

I think what I enjoyed the most about Titane is the way that it plays with sex, gender presentation, and the perception of what we want people to be versus what they really are. The first time we meet Alexia, she’s performing at a car show, the classic image of the motor-girl beauty; draped over the hood of a car, all tits and ass and raw sexuality – and then the movie goes on to have her disguise herself as a teenage boy, even having her perform the same dance in that guise later in the film.

The contrast between these two dance sequences, the way they serve to underline the inherent absurdity of this commodified female sexuality, is just a little taster of Ducournau’s complex and nuanced investigation of gender and femininity. The blend of the titular titanium of the cars Alexia engages with sexually and how they come to invade her body, Lindon’s hyper-masculine but utterly broken firefighter, Alexia’s developing pregnancy taking place once she is in her “boy” mode – it’s a fantastically rich text in what it has to say about gender, and one that invites interpretation.

But beyond the gender politics, which I could honestly talk about for three straight hours without running out of steam, Titane is a phenomenal horror movie, too. Like Raw, it’s got a visceral, unflinching, and almost matter-of-fact presentation of the nastier elements of the plot (which is, to be quite honest, most of them) that somehow makes it even more disturbing and memorable. Ducournau’s eye for the mesh of twisted metal and organic matter is instantly memorable, launching Titane to the upper echelon of body horror movies without relying on overused tropes. Rouselle is an outstanding villain and protagonist, fascinating and repulsive all at once, terrifying and alluring when she chooses to be.

Titane is, simply, one of the best and most interesting horror movies I’ve ever seen – a deft, dark, and deep exploration of sex, gender, and womanhood, all wrapped up in an unforgettably nasty body horror package. It might have taken me a year to write about it, but it’s going to be at least another thirty before I can get it out of my head.

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By Lou MacGregor

(header image via Cinema Daily US)