Julia Ducournau’s second feature is a motor-minded explosion of oily eroticism with a still-beating heart of emotional tenderness under its bonnet.

Though in conversation with Cronenberg’s “Crash,” there’s nothing like it as Ducournau crafts a meditation on identity and found family as uniquely brutal as it is beautiful.

If you can get past the grisly serial killings and body horror there is more to this movie than meets the eye.

For all its narrative defects, Titane is triumphant in sensation, wedding erotics to the macabre. Fluids and skin glow under neons, pinks and silvers, and the heat of flames.