SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. The opening of the movie takes on a different context once the viewer knows that Alexia’s car gambit is meant to procure human flesh for her to consume. In this way, the car crash scene is meant to be a contrasted “meal” scene in relation to Justine and the family eating out at a restaurant. Both are just relationships to flesh qua food. From the literal start of the film, Ducournau is demonstrating the way the viewer is conditioned to view one interaction with flesh differently from another based on social acceptance.

2.There’s an interesting suggestion that enjoyment can only be enjoyed via pursuit of a private fantasy. Julia can only enjoy meat when no one else know she’s eating it. First, she tries to steal a patty from the cafeteria. Unfortunately, the meat literally bleeds through her white coat, her social appearance breaks. Consequently she throws the meat away and confirms with Adrien that no one else saw her. She can’t enjoy it if anyone knows she has it.

Likewise, when Adrien and her get back after eating the kebabs, she can’t eat the meat in the fridge until he leaves. It’s telling because she was able to give in and enjoy meat around him earlier. Unless she’s in the frenzy, her social demeanor will stop her from giving in to the pleasure. However, as soon he leaves, she bites into the raw chunk of meat in obscene fashion, like a beast unhinged.

Finally, Adrien goes to masturbate to gay porn and is in the act before Justine walks back into his room. He immediately tries to hide the porn and shut the computer off. It’s strange given his profound pride in his queerness. Why would he then want to hide this behavior? His sexual encounter with Justine is thus juxtaposed against her relation to eating meat. If sexuality is an matrix that one can explore constantly even if “certain” in their identity, then appetite can function in the same way- both are just relations to enjoying flesh.

It also makes his later outburst with Justine a parallel to her similar shame when she throws away the patty she stole. Both of them are forced to confront that their desires don’t coincide with the ego identifications they’ve made and have to come to find themselves again.

3.A fantastic, albeit brief, moment occurs right after Alexia’s finger gets eaten by Justine. The family goes to a hospital and they sit in the waiting room. While there, Justine makes eye contact with an old man who she smiles at. The lighting is a distinctive green tint. It’s her attempt at projecting a controlled image despite the fact that it was her animalistic collapse that led to her family being summoned here. The old man (Other) seemingly knows this and reveals his dentures in disgusting fashion. Justine grimaces, but the old man takes pleasure in the obscenity and the lighting changes to a pronounced red. The excess has been revealed.

4.Justine wakes up to Adrien after her public debacle with Alexia and thinks that her roommate is being tender to her in light of it (or maybe she thinks they’ve slept together). However, as she goes to touch him she realizes that he’s dead and his leg has been partially eaten. She sees a reflection of herself, bloody, in the mirror and immediately think she’s responsible for the murder. She chastises herself and Adrien for not stopping her and is forced to confront the traumatic end-point of her condition, the point at which following it through will only destruction.

But then, she notices her sister Alexia, bloody on the floor in the unicorn shirt that Justine initially wore at the start of the film. Virginal innocence now bloodied by the site of cannibalistic devouring. Suddenly, the picture becomes clear. Justine gets to learn her lesson but is not culpable, at least not directly, for the violence informing it. Justine takes the green ski-pole that Adrien initially showed her on their first day together, a symbol of their first encounter now positioned to be a weapon commemorating their last. Right as she positions the pole on Alexia’s head, Justine has a change of heart and doesn’t sully the green of the pole in the red blood of Alexia.

5.Though Justine isn’t directly responsible for Adrien’s death, she is partially responsible for not locking the door to her room, thereby letting Alexia in. If Alexia is taken to stand in for Justine’s dark side, or a representation of what enjoyment with no limits looks like, then Justine’s decision to not lock the door to Adrien’s room after getting light treatment from Alexia for the cheek injury resulting from their fight is the consequence of not being able to properly delimit herself and the excesses of herself.

This relationship is present from the start of the film and is most clear in the film’s use of mirrors. Initially, Justine looks for encouragement from her sister. She puts on a dress and looks to the side for kind words from Alexia that would indicate the dress is nice. Later on, when the two are getting ready to do Justine’s bikini-wax, they brush their teeth for the night. At first, Justine has her own space. She has her own image. But then Alexia interrupts the space and literally splits Justine’s image.

Later on, Justine starts “finding herself” in a more sexual manner while dancing to “Plus Putes que toutes les Putes” by ORTIES, a sexually explicit and evocative song. While the song plays, Justine approaches her mirror before finally getting up on it and snogging her reflection. However, before she can get lost in her self-loving, she hears Alexia outside with Adrien and goes outside to ensure that nothing suspicious happens. Once again, the self Justine is trying to formulate is interrupted by her sister.

After figuring out Adrien’s dead, Justine stares at the mirror to figure out whether or not she’s the one who’s lost control. She knows that her image contains within it the possibility of becoming a monster, but she’s desperate to figure out a way to mediate it such that her own identity can come out and flourish without imploding in self-destructive manner.

It’s only at the end, when Justine has truly locked Alexia away, that the two “halves” can work in tandem. Their mirror images overlap before splitting and then coming back together; from one two come about creating a minimal difference – like a yin-yang symbol. There’s space for both of them to exist at the same time, as a composite, as difference.

6.The ending replicates the logic of the composite difference mirror-scene by demonstrating the logic of “eating” as ritual. The scene opens on Justine saying no to her mother. For the first time in the film, Justine is asserting herself in “domesticated” fashion. She refuses to eat her “greens” while wearing a red shirt. It’s clear that she’s trying to figure out a way to maintain a private space for her desire that won’t land her in jail like Alexia. She’s looking for a way to tame her desire and act on it, a mastery of sorts.

Justine’s father reveals to her that he not only knows about the sisters’ condition, but he also reveals that his wife also has the same desires. It turns out that human flesh is so much better tasting than anything else that Justine’s mother is a vegetarian most times because she only gets her meat from source. Jim William’s euphoric, and frenetic theme starts to play as it did the first time Justine tasted human flesh in the form of her sister’s finger while Justine’s father takes off his shirt to reveal chunks of his flesh missing. Suddenly, it becomes clear to her another road is possible.

In the same way the hazing violence gains meaning due to its status as ritual meant to include the student populace, Justine’s parents have given the cannibalism meaning in their lovemaking. They have literally carved out a space for Justine’s mother’s desire to operate in an “acceptable” manner. Justine demonstrates something similar herself when she bites down on her her during orgasm with Adrien, but this revelation from her father is confirmation that such pathways are a possibility.

7. Not since Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , has a film so thoroughly dissected the boundaries of the flesh and practices related to it. Both films take the starting point of animal as living creature turned into flesh to deconstruct the privileged vantage point of humans in relation to their own flesh. Both films also reveal that the bias against human flesh is not one of taste, although Hooper’s film reveals this in crueler and less consenting fashion on the part of the flesh consumer.

However, the point at which both films excel is in their demonstration that such demarcations are nothing more than ritual. Ritual contains within it the possibility of transforming the ordinary into the sacrosanct. In other words, if eating animals is okay because humans are privileged, then the attribute of being privileged must make the taste a privilege as well, as evidenced by Justine’s mother’s dedication to only eating her husband’s meat. This privilege becomes “formalized” in the process of lovemaking qua ritual which makes the experience fully enjoyable. It’s not absurd to compare the process to sacrament, which transforms bread and wine into manifestations of the Lord proper.

8.In addition to comparing sexual orientation to dietary restriction, Ducournau litters the film with recurring oral motifs, positing the idea of cannibalism as a manifestation of an particular oral fixation. In particular, smoking is seen as a commonplace and accepted practice that the adult figures in Justine’s lives endorse in spite of its health issues. It’s no coincidence that Justine’s first coincidence is one from her father given his role in assuaging her concerns about the future by showing her a pathway to relieve her inhibitions.