Love em or hate em, there’s one thing that you have to admit when it comes to the sleezy, morally questionable world of the rape/revenge movie there’s few genres that can match it for sheer misogyny. Regardless of the outcome – which usually ends in the previously victimised woman reclaiming vicious, brutal justice on her attackers – there’s still the initial assault to push through and more often than not, it’s a distressing assault that’s often distasteful and over long.
While many would correctly point out that the grueling nastiness is the whole point of movies like this, entries such as The Last House On The Left, Ms .45, I Spit On Your Grave and countless other exploitation flicks were almost always directed by men and used the drawn out sexual assaults to justify the sadistic revenge that followed.
Well brace yourself, because French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat is here to put a feminist spin on one of cinema’s most touchy subjects while leaving that exploitation tone fully intact. Can it be done? Can someone put a genuine woman’s touch on a sub-genre that’s renowned for exploiting them?
It’s time for some Revenge.
French businessman Richard is taking some time for himself by taking a helicopter out to his remote vacation home located far out in the desert and yo help him relax, he’s brought Jen, his sexy, young mistress, along for some R&R (that’s restcand relaxation). Jen is with this dashing, but married, man because she hopes he can help her fulfill her dreams and get her located in Los Angeles where she’s always wanted to live, but after a typical night of sweaty passion, she’s alarmed when two heavily armed men show up at the place.
These men are Stan and Dimitri and they’re arrived about a day too early in order to go hunting with their friend Richard who never actually intended the two groups to mingle, but as the day goes on, Jen relaxes and parties with her boyfriend’s buddies. However, the next morning, while Richard is away, Stan takes it upon himself to make an upsettingly threatening pass at her which soon turns physical and while Dimitri does absolutely nothing despite being fully aware, Jen is raped.
When Richard returns, Jen immediately tells him, but instead of taking her side, he tries to smooth things our in a way that suggests that he’s not going to help her realise her dreams after all, but when she threatens to tell his wife, matters get deadly. After being chased into the desert by the men who are desperate to get her to change her story, but just when you think Richard may be willing to take responsibility for what has happened, he suddenly shoves Jen off a nearby cliff who plummets to the bottom only to be impaled on a tree branch.
It seems that it’s cased closed on this particular issue, but when it turns out that Jen is actually alive, Richard, Stan and Dimitri start hunting foe the wounded woman, but unbeknownst to them, their victim has a something of a formidable survival instinct coupled with a sizable dose of peyote and before they know it, the trophy girlfriend has become the hunter.
Coralie Fargeat is obviously a director who understands and embraces the exploitation genre (possibly because she absorbed a lot of it during her formative years) but like a lot of her peers (Panos Cosmatos immediately springs to mind), she has the innate ability to turn what was magnificent sleezy trash back in the 70s and 80s and turn it into dazzling, art house horror/thrillers that mixes in a whole dollop of French Extreme New Wave cinema to make things extra gnarly. And make no mistake – Revenge is impressively gnarly. In fact, it’s weird to be old enough to remember when this sort of thing was viewed as anti-social, counter culture filth that should be oppressed and censored and now see the same sort of thing be praised and worshiped due to its meta, revisionist take on decidedly anti-social themes; but the question still remains – how exactly do you take the unavoidable misogyny out of a movie that even the more “thoughful” examples of the genre still uncomfortably revel in the suffering of women.
The solution turns out to be actually deceptively simple as Fargeat makes one simple alteration that makes things still hit hard while being palatable and that’s not to include a harrowing scene of sexual assault that inexplicably lasts for about 20 minutes. Oh the attack happens and it’s appropriate upsetting, but the director doesn’t make the physical act the be all and end all, eschewing nudity and graphic scenes in favour of more haunting details like focusing on Jen’s face as she’s pressed against a window, Dimitri walking in and then leaving as if he’s seen nothing at all and Stan’s brazen audacity that Jen owes him anything in the first place after a drunken dance the previous night. Also, because the perpetrators aren’t whooping rednecks and instead are “respectable” businessmen (or at least, Richard is), it makes their sudden turn to violence even more of a stinging betrayal.
From here, Fargeat takes standard tropes of the genre and weaponizes them to magnificent effect. Matilda Lutz’s Jen may be victimised and spends the rest of the film running around wearing next to nothing, but once she manages to get herself down from that tree that’s pierced her abdomen and taken Richard’s kickass peyote that she hid on her person earlier in the film, her heightened state of being allows her patch herself up and stride around like a ravaged Lara Croft (in hot pink star-shaped earings) in order to get revenge.
The symbolism is rife, with close ups of Jen’s sucking wound crawling with ants, or that act of cauterizing her wound with a flattened beer can leaves the image of a phoenix branded into her midsection like a badge of honor. In this respect, Revenge feels like it make a perfect double bill with the crazed, Nic Cage vehicle, Mandy (that’ll be Cosmatos again) as both deal with vengful, hallucinatory rampages that get pretty messy in spectacular fashion. In fact, Revenge gets so messy, that one scene set during the primal climax sees its participants barely able to stay upright due to all the impossibly slick blood on the ground and it’s just one of the many scenes that includes such things as a heightened reality and eyeball frazzling imagery that delivers all the good stuff that come with exploitation filmmaking while simultaneously trimming the more problematic issues in such a way that the experience doesn’t lose a single bit of impact.
Having seen this film after witnessing her amazingly memorable second movie, The Substance, Fargeat seems to be cornering the market on adding a strong feminist streak to various, infamous genres (rape/revenge, body horror) while retaining their nasty edges and more power too her and any film that has a rapist try for an excruciating eternity to pull a shard of glass out of a foot wound that would make John McClane faint, is totally OK with me.
An onslaught on the senses that makes a time worn sub genre seem fresh, new and, above all, relevant, in ways it hasn’t for years, Revenge contains all the chaotic, righteous fury you’d expect, without any of the problematic aftertaste.
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