But a fabulously farcical set piece establishes that Alexia will butcher anyone who catches her on a bad day, predatory or otherwise. At this stage you might assume Titane (the French word for titanium) to be a grisly thriller in which a vengeful vigilante dispatches predatory men. She attracts her fellow dancers – Ducournau's version of a rom-com meet cute is when Alexia's hair gets tangled with a colleague's nipple piercing in the showers – as well as an overzealous male fan, whose advances are rewarded with a sharpened metal hair pin jammed in his ear. Showing off the curling scar from her brain surgery, and the tattoo on her chest that declares, 'Love Is a Dog From Hell', Alexia is a minor celebrity in this sleazy netherworld. In a scene that could be a venomous parody of the Fast & Furious franchise, the camera prowls around a neon-lit motor show where young women pose and writhe on top of the souped-up merchandise – and no one poses and writhes with more frenzied abandon than Alexia, now a punky Tank Girl played by ferocious newcomer Agathe Rousselle. As soon as she leaves the hospital, she strides away from her parents and hugs and kisses the car instead.Īs an adult, she does more than that. But the operation has the opposite effect.

One session of icky, close-up brain surgery later, Alexia has had a titanium plate fitted in her head, which would be enough to put anyone off cars. She clambers around and kicks her dad's seat until he turns to snap at her, and – you guessed it – crashes into a concrete barrier. The only scene that ends in the way you might expect is the opening one, in which a little girl, Alexia, is misbehaving in the back of the family car.

It's also impossible to predict where it's going to go next. Five stars for Verhoeven's 'torrid melodrama'ĭucournau's beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy is a nightmarish yet mischievously comic barrage of sex, violence, lurid lighting and pounding music. Julia Ducournau, the French writer-director of Raw (2016), is back with a second juicy slice of extreme cinema, Titane, and it's sure to prompt more yelps, winces, groans and uneasy chuckles than anything else at this year's festival – or indeed anywhere else. But whenever such a film lurches onto the screen, it's invariably directed by a man: usually Gaspar Noé (Enter the Void, Climax) or Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon). Everyone at the Cannes Film Festival hopes to see something genuinely wild, transgressive, and guaranteed to put them off their dinner.

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