What’s the point of a weird, gonzo movie when it stops being weird? That’s my takeaway from French director Julia Docournau’s (Raw) Palme D’Or winning oddity, a movie that has been nicknamed, “That film where the lady gets impregnated by a car.” That does inexplicably happen, and I was waiting for more bizarre interludes, but then Titane becomes a completely different movie. The first half hour involves the car copulation and then becomes a slasher movie, as it’s revealed our heroine has been killing locals for months. We watch her kill her friend, on a whim, and then her roommate walks downstairs, a witness needing killing, and then another and another, and this for me was the darkly comic high-point of the film. From there she goes on the run, poses as a man’s missing adult son, and the movie becomes entirely about hiding her real identity, whether this grieving father fully suspects or even cares, and learning the ropes of fire department protocol. To say the second half of the movie is a creative letdown is an understatement. Titane feels like Docournau was combining different stray story elements from half-finished scripts and trying to, through sheer force of will, cram them together. The car fetish is never quite explained, which is fine, but once she’s impregnated, the movie becomes more of a standard drama about hiding her burgeoning pregnant belly to keep her cover. It seems quite strange for me to say that a movie about a woman impregnated by a car isn’t strange enough, and yet there it is. Titane will appeal to fans of David Cronenberg’s body horror and the French noveau horror scene, but I found its exploitation excess to be short-lived, and the creativity on display felt more stuck in neutral than as advertised.

Nate’s Grade: C