‘Titane’ is Ludicrous, Bizarre and Freaky But You Have to Watch it!

TITANE

Cast: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier
Direction: Julia Ducournau
Rating: ★★★★
Streaming on Mubi

Titane, 34-year-old screenwriter and director Julia Ducournau’s French film has finally arrived on our screens and it can only be described in superlatives. It is one of the scariest, craziest, most horrifying and ludicrous films I have ever seen.

Billed as a “body horror” film, Titane (French for titanium), is not for the weak-hearted. It tells the story of a psychopathic killer with a twist that is audacious not just in concept, but in execution as well. 

The film has sequences so violent and freaky that you’ll find yourself shutting your eyes in between scenes, yet Titane is riveting because its metallic core is warm and fuzzy, and because Agathe Rousselle’s performance is raw, ruthless and heartbreaking.

Titane opens with a scene that seems so mundane, and yet is a worrying prediction of things to come. Young Alexia is sitting and humming in the back of a car that her father is driving. But this leads to a disturbing rupture in their relationship, followed by an accident, an operation and a titanium metallic plate inside Alexia’s head. 

Little Alexia, bald and all stitched up from the operation, runs out of the hospital to hug the car, and when she grows up, she wears the scar like an accessory, a fleshy lace that rims her ear. 

Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) now works as a showgirl at a motorcar show, but when she gyrates seductively on a car, caressing it with her whole body, we are not sure who she is trying to seduce.

She has no interest in anything barring cars, and no real relationships. She doesn’t care for anyone except when they barge into her space—body or mind. That’s when she kills them. But one night, when a car flashes its lights at her, Alexia submits to its hold on her and her own desire.

The violence in Titane is savage, abrupt, and mostly without reason. And then it stops, suddenly. A police sketch of a serial killer is flashed everywhere and Alexia has to take on another identity. She pretends to be Adrian, the long-lost son of Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a firefighter. 

Alexia’s body is changing, becoming more and more feminine, but as Adrian she has to negotiate a very masculine world. As her belly grows, so does her vulnerability. But in Vincent’s embrace, Alexia begins to relax, to breathe for the very first time. The touching scenes between Adrian and Vincent form the heart of the film, making it pulsate with love and the fear of losing it.  

Mostly, female serial killers in movies are either victims of a heinous crime, a vicious moral wrong, or they are driven by obsessive love, revenge, greed. Titane’s plot is based on a concept that is beyond bizarre, but the film doesn’t tie itself into knots to explain Alexia’s motivation for the killings or her relationship with cars. It just demands a tacit understanding between Ducournau, Rousselle and us. That pact is forged by the director’s compelling storytelling and the actor. We are at once intrigued, repelled and mesmerised by Alexia.

Ducournau’s first film, Raw, came out in 2016. A bloody horror film, Raw was about a 16-year-old vegetarian girl, Justine, who enrolls at veterinary college, but after a hazing ritual—where she is made to eat raw rabbit liver—turns into a cannibal. During Raw‘s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, ambulances arrived and paramedics rushed to tend to moviegoers who had fainted. 

Titane is Ducournau’s second feature film, and last year, it won what is considered to be the most prestigious film award in the world, the Cannes International Film Festival’s Palme d’Or (given for Best Film), making her only the third woman ever to take home the Golden Leaf trophy in the festival’s 75 years.

There are moments in Titane that will make your blood freeze and you will pull back from the screen, but it reels you back in because of the way Rousselle embodies and plays Alexia and Adrien. It is not just a stunning performance, it is method madness.