Titane

Director: Julia Ducournau
Starring: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier, Lais Salameh
Distributor: Kismet Unit Trust
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2021
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: High impact themes and violence

This Belgium-French science-fiction, horror, psycho-sexual thriller is about a mentally disturbed woman who is impregnated after having sex with a car. It was awarded the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.

This subtitled, Belgium-French film, restricted in Australia to Adults Only viewing, was written by its director, Julia Ducournau. The only other woman to be awarded the Palme d’Or at a Cannes Film Festival is Jane Campion, for The Piano in 1993. The film’s title refers to a metal used in cars that is highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys. The prestigious Palme d’Or has never before gone to a horror movie.

A young girl, Alexia (Rousselle) is injured in a car crash, and the hospital to which she is admitted puts a titanium plate in her head. The hospital warns her father, who was the driver of the car, to look out for unexpected neurological symptoms. In confirmation of its prediction, Alexia develops an unexplained attachment to cars. She shuns her parents, and grows up to be a sex-model, who forms an erotic attachment to motor vehicles. But she also becomes a serial killer, who has an obsessive, sexual fascination with metal.

To avoid detection, Alexia disguises herself as a boy, and pretends to be Adrien, a man who disappeared 10 years previously. Adrien’s father, Vincent (Lindon), is still grieving for his son, and thinks he recognises his child. Vincent is possessive, and becomes strongly attached to Alexia, who remains with him.

This is a bizarrely disturbing film that is highly aggressive and confronting to watch. Within minutes it sends the viewer into uncomfortable psychological and emotional terrain. It shows grisly violence, attempted rape, brutal sex, self-mutilation, attempted immolation, drug injection, and struggles constantly to locate humanity where one would assume it ought to lie. It is a horror film that shocks. It intentionally explores the boundaries of violence and sex, and regales viewers repeatedly with traumatic body imagery – a pregnant Alexia, for instance, secretes black (car) oil from her body.

This is extreme cinema from a director who imaginatively directs a movie that is a gruesome indictment of male assault and sexual harassment. The movie reminds one of films such as David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), where Cronenberg inventively links technology with body imagery in horror mode. But Ducournau goes further, and attacks the boundaries of conventional film-making. The film aims to disturb, and it does. It uses extreme violence as a prelude to developing a compelling and moving attachment between a surrogate father (Vincent) and a lost child (Alexia) – and it does so in a highly original way. In the film, Ducournau, mounts a provocative case for creating a unique artistic horror genre that uses extreme violence to develop a human attachment theme. The major criterion of the success of this film resides in the nature of adult viewers’ experience of it, and the film is confronting, different, and original enough to make that a meaningful issue to raise.