Titane

The film opens with young Alexia being a difficult passenger on a drive with her father. After he loses patience, the car crashes. Alexia is rushed into surgery and a titanium plate is inserted into her skull. Discharged from the hospital, she walks past her waiting father in the parking lot and embraces a nearby car instead.

Years later, adult Alexia works as a dancer at car shows, performing erotic routines on the hoods of muscle cars. After a show a fan corners her in the parking lot to demand a kiss; she kills him with a hairpin through the ear. Back at the showroom she has a strange, half-tender encounter with a flame-painted Cadillac that ends with the car bouncing on its suspension as if in intercourse. Her belly soon swells; she leaks black motor oil from her wounds, and her body begins to fracture in patterns suggesting metal beneath the skin.

Alexia kills again — a one-night-stand, then a frenzied massacre at the house they were sleeping at where she kills several other people to silence witnesses. Wanted by police, she breaks her own nose against a bathroom sink, binds her chest and her growing pregnant belly with tape, and turns herself in at an airport as 'Adrien Legrand' — a boy who has been missing for ten years.

Vincent Legrand, an aging fire-station captain and Adrien's father, is summoned. He stares at the disfigured young person presented to him and chooses to accept her as his lost son, taking her home. Vincent injects himself daily with high-dose steroids to compensate for his aging body and is a quietly broken man. He brings 'Adrien' into the firehouse and his crew, who are skeptical but defer to him.

Alexia hides her pregnancy and the increasingly visible metallization of her body from Vincent. A wary crew member, Rayane, tries to expose her; she kills him too. A grudging bond forms between Alexia and Vincent over the weeks — at first he is deferring, then protective, then visibly knowing. He sees more of her than he lets on, and chooses her anyway.

In the final act Alexia goes into labor in Vincent's house. Her skin splits along her spine; metal shows beneath. Vincent helps her deliver. Alexia hemorrhages and dies in his arms. The baby that emerges has a metallic spine and a partly-machine body. Vincent lifts the newborn from Alexia's body, cradles it on the floor, and the film closes on him accepting the child as his own.