Revenge, 2017.
Directed by Coralie Fargeat.
Starring Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Bouchède, and Jean-Louis Tribes.
SYNOPSIS:
A woman is raped by her lover’s friend at a secluded house and begins a campaign of brutal payback when she is left for dead.
Revenge is one of those movies where the title says it all. Taking its cue from from grimy exploitation classics like I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House On the Left, Revenge gets going pretty much straight away as sexy young Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz – Rings) arrives at a secluded house in the middle of the desert with the apparently very wealthy Richard (Kevin Janssens – Quiz Me Quick). It turns out Richard is married and has a family but has managed to get away for a couple of days on what appears to be a regular hunting trip with his two ‘business associates’ Stan (Vincent Colombe – Point Blank) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède – Vermin), bringing his mistress long a day early for some extra playtime. However, Stan and Dimitri show up earlier than expected, inadvertently meeting Jen when Richard was hoping she’d be gone. When Richard pops out Stan forces himself into Jen, raping her while Dimitri sits in the next room, aware of what is going on but choosing to ignore it, but when Richard returns he is far from the knight in shining armour and with Jen wanting to leave Richard makes a choice, leaving her for dead while the three men go hunting. But when they go to pick up her body it is no longer where they left it…
Plot-wise, it must be noted, Revenge doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before in dozens of rape/revenge movies but what it does do is bring an artistic style and flair to a genre that is often limited by cheap productions or filmmakers looking to cash-in and knock a film out quickly. Visually the film is stunning, the vast expanses of the desert evoking Ozploitation classics such as Fair Game and more modern fare like Wolf Creek or Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes (both were shot in Morocco), the environment often being as cruel and unforgiving as the human antagonists but first-time director Coralie Fargeat’s use of sound is just as vital to the flow and impact of the movie as the visuals, the splats of blood and booms of gunfire often coming out of dead silence for maximum impact, and coupled with the techno/rock soundtrack that permeates much of the action Revenge is an assault on all the senses in a very gratifying way.
But amongst all the gruesome content and arty packaging there is a plot that, whilst simple and hardly original, does require a certain amount of acceptance or suspension of disbelief, such as you have to believe that Jen could survive in the extreme heat of the desert after being pushed from a cliff and impaled by a tree stump that she manages to escape from in a rather far-fetched way. This leads to a scene in a cave where Jen eats some hallucinogenic substances and manages to treat her injuries in a way that makes no logical sense but since when did exploitation movies have to make total sense in order to be enjoyed? There is also a lot of symbolism here, such as repeated shots of a rotting apple, that don’t really mean anything as there is very little in the way of gender politics or passages of time to equate a metaphor to.
Overall, Revenge is a fairly standard rape/revenge movie wrapped up in arthouse clothing that should please fans of both stylish arthouse cinema and low-rent grindhouse/exploitation. The acting is pretty good throughout, the violence is brutal and the gore totally gratuitous but well staged, leading to a finale that shamelessly borrows from American Psycho but you’ll be too invested in watching Jen get her… ahem… revenge to worry about such trivial matters. On this basis, however, despite some small niggles it looks like Coralie Fargeat could be a name to watch as Revenge, for a debut feature, hits the ground running with real style and barely lets up until the satisfying end.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
