REVENGE (2017)
Directed by : Coralie Fargeat
I was a little dismissive of Revenge before watching it. Another revenge thriller? Yawn. What this is, though, is kind of I Spit on Your Grave from an intelligent woman's point of view - and what we get from it is blood, courage, and the idea that women are made to tolerate great pain, which can be transformative. That's an advantage exploited to the full by Jen (Matilda Lutz), who had joined Richard (Kevin Janssens) on a trip to his out-of-the-way vacation home in a desert location to have fun (and cheat on his wife.) When Richard's friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) join the couple, all is leisurely and there's a party atmosphere. Stan, however, takes Jen's intimacy as permission to have sex, and when she refuses him he rapes her while Richard is out. When he returns, Jen wants to leave immediately, and when she refuses to accept a pay-out and job offer to forget the whole incident she's pushed over a cliff and ends up impaled on a tree. The three men go hunting, with the intention of coming back later to take care of the body. When they return though, the body is gone...but how much trouble could the badly injured Jen possibly cause them?
Revenge is gory fun. We get to watch people pull glass shards out of their feet, tree branches out of their guts, and generally splatter flesh and bone everywhere. It only falls down, in my eyes, as far as believability goes. For example (mild spoilers coming), Jen spends half a day or so with a tree branch sticking through her midriff, and it's far too painful to pull it out and cauterize the wound - so she turns to peyote, which she's heard can completely separate herself from her agony. When she's completely under the influence she pulls the branch from her body and burns the wound with a discarded beer can heated over a fire. I don't know if any of this is really possible, and I'm not sure if her wounds are survivable, let alone not severe enough to completely incapacitate her. In fact, she's hurt so badly that I at first assumed that Jen was going to come back as a zombie and hunt down her foes - I did not think it possible for her to do what she does, considering the fact that she's been impaled on an entire tree branch. If you or I survived what she does, we'd need the help of two nurses slowly getting to and from the hospital toilet. Jen is running and diving around like a commando the very next day. It's a quibble though - because this is an enjoyable movie, and it also manages to double as great horror.
Revenge has the feel of an early Peter Jackson film, and that has me excited about Coralie Fargeat's next movie, The Substance, which is already receiving rave reviews. I've never felt as much of a supporter of the feminist cause as I was while watching this exploitation film - and that's a sentence I never thought I'd ever type. It distils the very best of it's genre, and see's it's protagonist reborn through suffering and pain as a kind of phoenix-figure. Better yet, it doesn't feel the need to hammer home it's points about a woman's strengths and abilities - that's part of the narrative, as are the darker subjects of sexual aggression and consent. There's a fine balance when it comes to how trashy a film like this can be (just take the abovementioned I Spit on Your Grave as an example), and here the feel of everything is so right. I found myself fascinated by Fargeat's approach, which fixates on horror, gore, pain and suffering - and how they're overcome - rather than the usual role reversals we get in most revenge thrillers. It was a little different, while still being familiar - but overall it was so surprisingly good. I was really amazed in the end - keep an eye out for this young filmmaker.
Glad to catch this one - it has a 93% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and is one of 16-or-so movies with the title "Revenge".
Watchlist Count : 432 (-18)
Next : Bliss (2019)
Next : Bliss (2019)
Thank you very much to whomever inspired me to watch Revenge.
__________________
Remember - everything has an ending except hope, and sausages - they have two.
Latest Review : Aftersun (2022)