Review - Titane (2021)

Directed by: Julia Ducourneau

Starring: Agathe Rousselle, Vincent Lindon, Garance Marillier

Go Horror Rating: A

While this review avoids spoilers, Titane is a film best experienced as blindly as possible. Queer horror is not a new phenomenon. From the iconic Rocky Horror Picture Show to the more outwardly problematic but still valuable Silence of the Lambs, even long predating film with lesbian vampire novella Carmilla, the relationship between queer culture and horror stories has always been a tight one. There’s a catharsis to seeing exaggerated forms of your own struggles represented in media, one that horror is uniquely equipped to handle.

While it’s not mandatory, and perhaps not even intentional, Titane is a film that so massively benefits from my own queer interpretations, is so fundamentally defined by its parallels to the trans experience, that I literally cannot imagine what it would even be like to view it through another lens.

When it comes to minority representation in media, the tendency seems to be that our stories are only told when we are suffering. With horror, this comes naturally of course, but the thing that makes Titane so unique, so incredibly moving, is the fact that this isn’t only a tale of suffering. We see the protagonist go through crushing lows but, more importantly, we see the more complex and beautiful elements of what it means to be queer. Chosen family, sexual liberation, and unconditional love are the themes that truly give the film its impact, more than any tense or gory moment ever could.

So how is it horror? Well, like Videodrome, Society, and Tetsuo before it, Titane dives head-on into the psychosexual brutality of body horror – a genre just as repulsive as it is beautiful.

Body horror is a genre uniquely equipped to tell trans stories. There are few things more viscerally terrifying than the thought of waking up with an anatomy incongruous with the one that belongs to you, and being forced to manually repair it piece by piece. Sound familiar? Titane takes a gradual approach to its body horror, but even in its climactic moments the subtlety and nuance of the portrayal never fails to present itself. The outwardly gruesome imagery of chest binding and body modification is supplemented and given purpose by far more intimate expressions of dysphoria, like naming discomfort and crossdressing. Add on to this the recurring dynamic of dysphoria vs. dysmorphia that plagues our two leads, and it makes for one of the most wide-reaching and accurate representations of the trans experience ever put to film.

This is all before mentioning the other important theme of the film, the one that is given to us right from the opening – Hypersexualization after trauma. It’s far more difficult to approach this without getting into outright spoilers, but as a parallel to the very real trans experience of using sex as a means of coping with the harsh realities of a world only out to commodify or discard you, it’s absolutely an apt and powerful presentation.

There’s very little that can prepare you for your initial viewing of Titane. I do my best here to provide a nonspecific overview of why the themes resonate the way that they do, but I could go into so much more detail about the iconic score, the beautiful cinematography and color palette, the nail-biting tension, and so much more if I so wished. At the end of the day, though, that’s all set dressing for what coalesces into one of the most thematically rich and dense films to come out of indie horror in a while, and possibly the most resonant film of the decade so far.