Titane review: A freaky body horror film that leaves a metallic taste in mouth

3/5

STORY: With a titanium plate fitted in her skull, Alexia dances on car bonnets and kills people with a hair stick, until she meets an elderly but agile firefighter who takes care of her as a little child.

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REVIEW: Titane is not for the faint-hearted. Model and actor Agathe Rousselle (as Alexia) is at the centre of filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s blood-curdling body horror film. The French-Belgian production is outlandish, disturbing and squirmish from scene one. These, however, also become the reasons for you to continue watching this coming-of-age film, as you try to unravel the roguish motives of a woman who survived a horrific car accident during her childhood, but ever since has a titanium plate fixed in her head.

More impish than intrepid, Alexia is a dancer and seductive body movements pro, who kills people with equal poise. It’s hard to decipher if the crash is the reason for her ruthlessness or is it because of her frosty relationship with her father (Bertrand Bonello). With a hair stick, she brutally murders people one after the other, in a fit of rage for no apparent reason. One may think that the lack of compassion from her father is what pushed her to this callousness and hostility, but some signs of eccentricity were evident in her even before the car crash.

Yes, it’s a biological horror film, so you go for it mentally prepared, but there are way too many terrifying sequences in the 1-hour-48-minute movie that will make you cringe and look away. Agathe owns the narrative with her spellbinding performance. There isn’t a dull moment in the film. It’s distressful, but not unstimulating. Throughout, she struggles with her wounded and tangled psyche that makes her susceptible to commit crimes and inflict serious harm on herself too. It isn’t just the broken bond with her father, Alexia is also confused about her sexual orientation. Already hiding around after authorities try to trace the serial killer in town, an unexpected pregnancy only adds to her already heightened anxiety.

Agathe dabbles in the myriad layers of the character with perfection. As Alexia and later as Adrien. Riddled with apprehension, fear and sleeplessness, she leaves home one day only to find herself at the cabin of a daredevil firefighter (Vincent Lindon), who was until then searching for his missing son. He takes Alexia home, assuming her to be his lost son, Adrien. Amid the oddities of broken families and battered relationships, they form a bond of empathy and compassion as a parent and child. Still vulnerable, but somehow, they manage to ease their senses in each other’s company.

Recipient of the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2021, Titane is said to be a follow-up to Julia’s debut film Raw, which was also a horror drama. But if you haven’t watched that film, it does become a bit tricky to decode what exactly led to so much bitterness and antagonism in the central character of Titane.

VERDICT: Watch the film at your own risk! Alexia is crude, scary and dangerously unpredictable. There are reasons to like Vincent, though. An old man himself, the way he musters strength to protect his child even when he is ​​scraping the bottom of the barrel makes it worthwhile, well at least.

*Reema Gowalla is an arts and culture journalist, who mostly writes about theatre and independent cinema, and sometimes also delves into culinary heritage.