Woll, whose creative vision shaped the series, will serve as both dungeon master and storyteller on each episode, leading a group of adventurers in a race against time to prevent an unholy prophecy from coming true. A first preview of the show is available here.
Each episode will premiere on Alpha – the Legendary-owned subscription service, which hosts premium content from Geek & Sundry and Nerdist – and promises to be unlike any other RPG series. RELICS AND RARITIES is based on the classic Dungeons & Dragons game.
In theaters.Prepare to dive into a fantasy world full of the most loathsome mystery, monsters and murders with RELICS AND RARITIES, an original weekly episodic series premiered in February 2019 by Geek & Sundry and created in collaboration with Deborah Ann Woll ( daredevil, Real blood). Titane Rated R for sex and violence, in and with cars. For all its reckless style and velocity, “Titane” doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go. The pregnancy supplies some suspense, of course, but the situation becomes curiously static, and the provocations increasingly mechanical. The hectic, brutal intensity that drives the first part of the movie, before Alexia becomes Adrien, dissipates in the middle, as the narrative engine sputters.
It’s no wonder that those concerns don’t entirely cohere, given Ducournau’s furious sensationalism. This is what I mean by high thematic ambition: “Titane” is a movie concerned with gender politics, metaphysics, the nature of love and a great deal more. “To you, I’m God,” he tells the men, adding that his son is therefore Jesus - but also, the audience knows, a kind of Madonna figure, carrying a miraculously conceived child. He insists that Adrien/Alexia will be one of the boys, with some special privileges. His firehouse is a cauldron of unchecked virility and barely suppressed homoeroticism. He fights aging with heavy doses of steroids, and seems willfully to overlook signs of his supposed son’s real identity. But Vincent turns out to have kinks and complications of his own. Lindon, an avatar of weary, blue-collar masculinity, seems at first to be too obvious a foil for Rousselle. Once Alexia becomes Adrien, moving in with Vincent (Vincent Lindon) and joining his crew, she seems less like a predator than a vulnerable, isolated misfit. Rousselle, a model making her film debut, has a sullen magnetism. “I’m exhausted,” she complains to one of her victims, who actually seems to feel sorry for her. “How many of you are there?” she asks as a quiet evening of one-on-one homicide threatens to turn into a mass casualty event. There is slapstick as well as dread in the way Ducournau stages Alexia’s crimes. Through the stroboscopic aggression of Ducournau’s images you can glimpse ideas about gender, lust and the intimacy that connects people and machines. Awarded the top prize in Cannes this year, “Titane” consolidates a filmmaking style based on visceral shock, grisly absurdism and high thematic ambition. The first, “Raw,” which also included a character named Alexia (and one named Adrien), was a gruesome, witty, insistently thoughtful quasi-horror movie about sex, cannibalism and the varieties of hunger. “Titane” is Julia Ducournau’s second feature. As the pregnancy progresses, Alexia starts to lactate petroleum. The father, as far as we can tell, is a Cadillac with hydraulic suspension and a custom paint job. But there is a complication: Alexia is pregnant. The disguise works well enough to convince the boy’s dad, Vincent, the ultra-manly commander of a fire-and-rescue squad. Having seen a computer-generated image of the teenager Adrien might have grown up to be, Alexia fashions herself into a plausible likeness, cutting her hair short, binding her breasts and smashing her nose against a bathroom sink.
As the bodies pile up and the law seems to be closing in, she leaves the house where she lives with her parents and takes on the identity of Adrien Legrand, a boy who went missing many years before. Alexia is a strip-club dancer in the South of France whose hobby - her compulsion, her kink, her vocation - is murder.