Titane by Julia Ducournau

As a kid, I’d sometimes found myself watching the British game show ‘Hole in the Wall’, an adaptation of the Japanese game ‘Brain Wall’, in which players would contort their bodies to fit through vaguely human-shaped cutouts in a rapidly approaching large styrofoam wall. They did this in an attempt to avoid being submerged in the swimming pool behind them. They did this in an attempt to ‘move forward’. The player, padded up and helmeted, sweating under the bright lights of studio eyes, knew that success would not come naturally. Their body would be bent and broken and forced into its Barbie doll approximation of impressiveness, and only through becoming that inexplicable mould would anyone be happy.

Titane is a film of forced fluidity. In a world made up of styrofoam boards swinging in at us from all angles, of disproportionate, anatomically questionable cutouts curling us into submission, Titane asks what it looks like to carve out new possibilities with the sting of our teeth. Titane questions what it means to rip apart convention and genre and gender, to allow yourself to move through the brick walls that have cornered you into a predestined and hollow existence. Its movement is not kind, or considerate. It is urgent, scathing, clawing, confronting. It is violent and cathartic in excavating an existence that dares to break the cisheteronormative current of the universe. Its movement is not desired, or required, but it exists nonetheless.