Richard Brody at The New Yorker:
The curse of genre is that it encourages filmmakers to downplay causes in the interest of effects. In the best genre movies, the quantity and power of these effects serve as sufficient compensation for the thinned-out drama. “Titane,” the new film by Julia Ducournau, is a genre film, a twist on horror with a twist on family—like Ducournau’s first feature, “Raw.” But “Titane” is far stronger, far wilder, far stranger. The radical fantasy of its premise—a woman gets impregnated by a car—wrenches the ensuing family drama out of the realm of the ordinary and into one of speculative fantasy and imaginative wonder that demands a suspension of disbelief—which becomes the movie’s very subject.
The film’s protagonist, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), has an affinity for cars that amounts to a sort of destiny. As a child (played by Adèle Guigue), Alexia is sitting in the back seat of a car driven by her father (Bertrand Bonello, himself a notable director), who’s got music on the radio.
more here.