Everyone’s horror pressure points are different. Either because of where or how you were raised, your lifestyle, or even just your own peculiarities, we have all encountered horror movie things that wig us out to no end that other people take in stride (and vice versa). Every ranking of scariness should be taken with a grain of salt and parsed for explanation about what makes it scary, because odds are we all have different tolerances. Which is all to say, hear the full breadth with which I say this: Titane, which is leaving Hulu this Saturday, is one of the few movies that has made me physically nauseous as I watched it, and I think probably everyone should.
Titane was known before its release as “the movie where a woman gets impregnated by a car.” This is more or less the story in a nutshell; Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) has loved cars since a childhood auto accident left her with a titanium plate in her head. As an adult, she lives as a showgirl at a motor show — where, yeah, she eventually has sex with a car — and also is a serial killer who’s killed a few people over a few months. Once she finds out she’s pregnant, she goes on the run, hiding in plain sight as Adrian Legrand, a young boy who disappeared a decade ago at age 7. Unfortunately, Adrian’s dad Vincent (Vincent London) is all too happy to accept Adrian’s return with no questions asked, even as her pregnancy starts to show.
When I say Titane is very French, I’m not just talking about the subtitles. Titane is part of the New French Extremity horror movement, marked as much by transgressive values as it is by brutal intimacy. These are stories that often hinge around violence and body horror. This is, as you might’ve guessed, a sticky horror place for me, someone who doesn’t really enjoy watching people get their ears stabbed with a hair stick.
Titane is riddled with the balance of such grotesquerie and weirdness. Alexia realizes she’s pregnant when she starts dripping motor oil out of her vagina. She uses the same hair stick she uses for killing to attempt an abortion, and then goes on a rampage. For a more recent comparison you can look to act three of The Substance, only with more violent viscera coming out. It would be simply bloody terror if it weren’t for all the motor oil. It is also stomach churning — complimentary.
Because Titane — like its New French Extremity brethren — is far more than just its horrors. As we follow Alexia through her rampage and eventual retreat, the movie bounces like a lowrider cruising, ricocheting off gruesome images and gendered themes alike. The characters of the film struggle to control their changing bodies, constantly intertwined and at odds with what they see in the mirror. The horror drives things to extremes and then dances there. For better or worse, we’re hauled along for the ride. That Titane feels like it can and will go anywhere makes for a tense viewing, the sort of thing that leaves you so clenched that you get to the end and realize you have been on edge to the point of physical discomfort.
Titane may certainly seem like the kind of gonzo film that’s “just asking questions” without appropriately answering them, and I’m not wholly convinced that critique is wrong. But years later, my throat still clenches a bit at the thought of it — and that’s the kind of gut feeling that suggests it’s at least interesting enough to chew on.
Titane is leaving Hulu on Saturday, Feb. 15, so if you want to see how strong your stomach is, I suggest you check it out soon.
