Even before Alexia gets the titanium plate planted in her head, she is not a particularly nice girl.

She spends the first few minutes of the film getting on our and her father's nerves so badly that he has an accident, which permanently damages Alexia's skull plate.

She grows up to be a young woman who has autosexual inclinations, that is, really to bodywork and internal combustion engines, and who is also otherwise rather strange.

For example, she has a tendency to murder people who cross her mind.

Andrea Diener

Editor in the features section.

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Because the police are on her trail, she pretends to be the missing, now grown-up son of a fire chief and moves in with him.

A touching father-son rapprochement ensues, which is not broken by the fact that it gradually dawns on the father that the person who moved in with him is not the missing Adrien.

Motor oil from body orifices

All of this could have been told straight and realistically, but that's exactly what the French director Julia Ducournau doesn't do in her Cannes winning film “Titane”. She stages the belt bondage sex scene between Alexia, the auto show dancer, and the dashing exhibition Cadillac like a garish music video from good old MTV “Pimp my Ride” times. The rapprochement between man and machine leads to pregnancy, which gives the opportunity to stage the outflow of motor oil from all possible body orifices with relish. And Ducournau's enthusiasm for body horror in all its forms is also noticeable in other ways: close-ups are sewn and sprayed, sheet metal bursts from body parts, and sharp objects are rammed into heads.

All of this is somewhat disturbing, but despite all the shock effects, the film takes its character and its story seriously, the whole beautiful splatter doesn't happen for its own sake. That's why it's good that this was staged by a director who has a feel for situations that women are uncomfortable with. From the filthy rabble of adolescents on the bus to the stubborn admirer who chases after Alexia in the dark and doesn't understand how threatening he looks.

And finally this whole fertility thing that such a body puts on you.

The film also offers identifiable, connectable situations: It is really incredibly annoying if you want to eliminate the witnesses after the murder, and an unmanageable number of people live in this flat share.

It also greatly relieves an award-winning feminist horror splatter drama when a spark of humor shows up in the greatest carnage.

Normally something like this would be staged as an empowerment story: it becomes too much for a woman, then she takes up a weapon.

Here it is exactly the opposite.

This Alexia, played by Agathe Rousselle, only finds her way into a feeling of security as her son Adrien in the midst of this male-dominated, virile fire-fighting world, which frees her from all the killing.

Fireman Vincent (Vincent Lindon) finds in him or her exactly what he was missing.

Even if this young being is pregnant by a Cadillac that has been driven along and will eventually give birth to something that you don't really want to know.

Maybe you can love it anyway, and maybe this love helps against everything.