French-Algerian director Emma Benestan takes a fresh approach to some monster/revenge tropes to give us a dark fable of female power.

Set in the Camargue in France, we see a bull farming and running community where Nejma (Oulaya Amamra) is the only female. Bull running is a ‘sport’ where angry bulls are led in to an arena and ‘runners’ try to grab a rosette or tassel from their horns without being maimed or killed. It’s a less extreme version of bull fighting where the bull is not overtly harmed but the danger is the same for the runners.

Nejma lives and breathes bulls – I noticed that just about every piece of clothing she has has some kind of bull motif on it – and she is supported by the other men who help her train. Closest is Tony, the son of the ranch owner, who is not-so-openly gay and treats her like a slightly annoying sister. One night Nejma accompanies the other ranch hands on a night of drinking and narcotics and they take her to a remote area where ‘the bulls go to die’. She finds herself back in her bed the next morning with no memories of the rest of the night but from this point on, she finds odd changes to her body and the ranch hands begin to die.

It is no secret that there are elements of human to bull transformations – a werebull – in the story. Like in Raw, there is a sense of a ferocity being awoken in Nejma that is animalistic and sparked by misogyny and ill treatment. The film works best where it keeps these elements symbolic, using noise and darkness and consequences to help us imagine what might be happening to Nejma at night. there is one scene where we are shown the transformation and it feels unnecessarily clunky – our imaginations were doing just fine.

It’s an interesting look at a culture and community with beautiful cinematography (although maybe a few too many night scenes). It is at its strongest when it is showing us the spaces and day to day activities where we get the best sense of the life, particularly for a lone woman. The two scenes that stood out for me and felt transformative were the calf branding in the third act – it was honestly a surprise reveal for me and I felt this was handled in a way that showed the impact without being gratuitous – and the final, muddied, animalistic scene.