The blood-spattered French cannibal thriller “Raw” is arriving in theaters several months after its midnight showings at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, where its most intense moments caused enough fainting spells to draw paramedics.

I headed to a recent press screening with nervous anticipation and an emptier stomach than usual, steeling myself for what was going to be, by all accounts, a finger-lickin’ good fright.

“Raw” is very much that and more, in part because it is also, in a crucial sense, less. Breathless hype, particularly when it involves mass blackouts and nausea, can twist a movie’s reputation in ways both apt and misleading, and to overemphasize this one’s grisliness would in some ways undersell its achievement.

The severed digits and half-chewed limbs we see may be marvels of prosthetic ingenuity, but “Raw” shreds its characters’ flesh, to say nothing of the viewer’s nerves, with a discretion and skill that I can describe only as exquisite. It’s a total gross-out, but it’s also a delicacy. Julia Ducournau, making a stellar feature writing-directing debut, fosters the kind of disquieting intimacy with her characters that leaves us continually uncertain of whether we should fear them or fear for them.

The story concerns a 16-year-old girl named Justine (Garance Marillier), a strict vegetarian who, while dining out in an early scene, finds a chunk of sausage in her mashed potato; it will hardly be Justine’s last encounter with meat, especially when she enrolls at the veterinary school where her older sister, Alex (Ella Rumpf), is a student.

For just a few moments, we could be watching an ordinary boarding school drama, in which Justine, a gifted student, finds herself caught off-guard by a period of intense ritual hazing. We are plunged headlong into the thrill and confusion of her initiation. Later, they will be doused with animal blood and then each forced to ingest a rabbit’s kidney.

It’s this latter rite of passage that Justine balks at, but Alex slurps down a kidney without a second thought and urges her sister to do the same. Justine obeys and discovers that she now has a sudden, insatiable hunger for meat, a mixture of youthful revulsion and desire that clearly invites a carnal interpretation.

Ducournau is hardly the first filmmaker to mine the body-horror lexicon for ripe pubescent metaphors, but hers may be the most audacious and controlled spin on it to emerge in some time. It’s no coincidence Justine begins craving human flesh around the same time she develops an infatuation with her studly roommate, Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella).

Ducournau embraces the tenderness and the ferocity in her material, and she cleverly uses the veterinary setting to collapse assumed distinctions between woman and beast. Sometimes she pulls the camera back, framing the campus and its open surroundings in ways that suggest a remote alien landscape. And sometimes she moves in for the kill, so close that we can practically smell the blood, waste and formaldehyde.

But the director never loses sight of the sisterly rapport at the heart of the movie. Rumpf’s performance is a wicked, punky delight. And Marillier makes Justine no less formidable or volatile a figure.

justin.chang@latimes.com