Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021)

I can't really see what all the fuss is about this film, which is undoubtedly extremely powerful but not, surely, a horror film? In a sense it's quite humorous, albeit in an absurd way: OK, a very absurd way. Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) as a child is involved in a car crash with her father, and as a result has a brain operation which involves a titanium implant. As she grows, things change, and her sexy contorsions at a car showroom with other young women to please customers – sex and cars, you know? – are just a beginning.

Her play-acting – which it isn't really – with cars lead her to admirers, have fans like a rock star. People, though, don't know that she's not into people: cars are (quite literally) her orgasm. And when one fan goes over the line and starts slobbering over her, he gets to meet her very strong hairpin: right through what little brain he has, via his earhole. And as the killings escalate, Alexia is wanted by the police and has to change her identity.

Titane is a film of several sexual identities: the regular heterosexual, the strong homosexual hints, the bisexual, and of course the sex with metal. Confusion reigns, and Alexia in a very powerful but untrue sense changes sex when she realises that she has to take on another identity: recognising that a missing boy strongly resembles her, this is her chance to become him, become Adrien. And as Adrien's father the pompier, who has far more problems than his lost son, is very gullible he comes to see Alexia as the missing Adrien.

Although he just wants to believe that a non-reality is a reality, in spite of others (including his former partner) realising that he's just fooling himself, and being fooled. Or is he? Isn't he merely knowingly pretending, isn't the ageing Vincent discovering new forms of sex and love, not really being self-deceptive? Irreality is the new real, and just look at Alexia's baby with the titanium studs in his back!

Julia Ducournau's Grave | Raw (2016)

I've not yet seen Julia Ducournau's second film, Titane, which has only recently been released, although a tale of a female serial killer having sex with a car and becoming pregnant by it is, well... Grave is perhaps more believable, although it concerns an adolescent vegetarian being forced into eating a raw rabbit kidney during her bizutage (hazing ceremony) at veterinary school. This leads not only to her craving cooked meat, but to developing a taste not only for raw meat, but for cannibalism and even autophagia (yeah, eating yourself).

In Belgium, sixteen-year-old Justine (Garance Marillier), who has been brought up as a vegetarian by her mother (Joana Preiss) and father (Laurent Lucas) with a slightly older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), is shocked that her sister denies, on the day she begins the veterinary school that Alexia already is a student at, that she is vegetarian. Reluctantly, Justine eats the kidney. She then tries to steal a steak from the canteen, eats a meat sandwich at night with her student friend Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella) at night when she can't be seen, but the meat lust in her nature continues.

Her first taste of meat may well have provoked a severe instance of psoriasis, but it can't stop her once started. When Alexia uses a painful kind of depilatory wax on her vaginal hair she has to use scissors, but Alexia accidentally cuts off her finger in the process. When she's unconscious, Justine drinks the blood from the finger and then eats the finger itself: coming to, Alexia sees this and the whole matter is blamed on her dog, which is put down.

But the two sisters have a terrible common bond: they are both of cannabalistic nature, and although they try to control each other it's not too easy. Interestingly, sexual desire is mixed with cannabalistic desire, a conflicting desire which Justine manages to control when she has sex with Adrien and takes a bite from her own arm. The climax to this bizarre orgy comes one morning when Justine wakes up next to Adrien. Everything seems normal, but when Justine looks closely she sees that Adrien is dead, his thigh partly eaten away. Crazily, believing that she has done it, she asks him why he didn't put up a fight. But then she finds Alexia slumped in a semi-catatonic state against the fridge, and realises that she's the guilty one.

And so Alexia is imprisoned, but the father reveals the family problem to Justine: they aren't responsible because when the father met the mother he couldn't understand why she didn't want to go out with him. But the first time they kissed, the father unbuttons his shirt and reveals the scars on his body, the chunks of flesh removed. He's sure Justine will be able to work things out.

This is a coming-of-age story in which our many identities are investigated, and as such is of far more value than the average horror film.