A dramatic feature by Québeçoise director Anne Claire Poirier, Primal Fear confronts the difficult issue of rape from a woman's perspective - as an act of political aggression and domination, and as an emotionally scarring experience which leaves the victim in a state of fear and shame. Primal Fear employs an interesting structure, beginning with a harrowing rape sequence shot from the victim's point of view, then intertwining the young woman's experiences after the attack with scenes in which actresses portraying the film's director and editor discuss the impact of the dramatic segments.

Originally entitled “Mourir à tue-tête,” Primal Fear was extremely well-received at the 1979 Cannes and New York festivals (though not without stirring up some controversy among New York feminists). Village Voice critic Molly Haskell compared Primal Fear (quite favorably) to the French film Rape of Love by Yannick Bellon in an article on “Rape in the Movies”:

“Men seem incapable of understanding what rape means to a woman - the sense of total violation, or the mere threat of rape as a lifelong shadow over her freedom of movement.... The central division is between the sense of rape as an act of hostility and aggression, as women see and know and experience it, and rape as an erotic act, as fantasized by men.... Films on rape in recent years have fallen into one of these two camps - the exploitation fantasies of lust and revenge... and small independent films by women,... which describe first-hand horrors and are seen only by women. Two new films about rape intend to bridge the gap. They are by women and from a woman's point of view, but they use actresses and fictional devices to reach a larger audience. Primal Fear... is the harsher and more disturbing of the two.... It examines rape in both its widest social context and its devastating effect on one individual. Rape of Love... is the sexier and, perhaps synonymously, the more commercial film.

“Both films begin with a rape scene that is prolonged, brutal and humiliating.... The difference is that the heroine of Rape of Love is a beauty, and the rape is performed not by a single psychopath but a gang of heavy-drinking yokels, a group that's only one step removed, the filmmaker implies, from your average male-bonding barflies on a spree....

“Poirier stages the rape (in Primal Fear) in a way that effectively de-eroticizes it and underlines the physical and mental violence. A man ambushes a nurse and locks her in his van. After a long abusive harangue in which he assures her he is not interested in her sexually, he makes her undress and rapes her. The scene is dimly lit. The woman, shot unerotically from the side and back, cowers in the corner, diminished into an animal-like victim. The man is neither awesome nor sexual, but grubby, an antagonist whose moment of power is underwritten by violence....
“The next scene is set in an editing room where the director... and a friend discuss the footage we have just seen and its implications. We are told that another friend... found nothing at all erotic until the woman undressed.... Then, against all reason, he was turned on. It is this sort of question, and admission, that give the film its disturbing power. If a man... can have found this scene arousing, what hope is there that male and female perspectives can ever be reconciled?”