Revenge

Cast: Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, and Vincent Colombe  

Director: Coralie Fargeat   

108 minutes (18) 2017

Second Sight 
Blu-ray region B  

[Released 11th May]

Rating: 7/10

Review by Steven Hampton

A French action-horror with some dialogue in English, Revenge is the feature debut from writer-director Coralie Fargeat. Clearly wealthy Richard (Belgian TV actor Kevin Janssens) brings his blonde mistress, Jennifer (Matilda Lutz, Rings) to a remote house in the desert. 

At first, Jen seems like a flirty Lolita fantasy but the arrival of boozed-up rednecks Dimitri and Stan disrupts the couple’s plans. Tensions increase during a morning of intimidation, and creepy insults, ending with rape. After she runs away, Jen is left for dead by all three men.  

The notorious I Spit On Your Grave franchise an obvious point of reference for this graphically violent and stylish thriller - but, perhaps wisely, there are no lingering images of the rape. At its heart is a spirited performance from Italian star Lutz, suffering through a nightmarish ordeal, yet emerging into powerful vigilante heroism after surviving mortal terrors and the searing agony of severe injury, with an effective determination seemingly made possible from eating a dose of peyote.

Shot on Moroccan locations, beautifully presented throughout by its excellent widescreen cinematography, the intensity of vivid hallucinations, and Jen’s grisly dreams, all adds up to a heavyweight genre appeal for her phoenix-like rise (complete with a bird image that is branded across her belly) from victim to slayer. Unlike similar American movies of this type, Revenge owes a debt (which is paid back in full) to European cinema developments surrounding millennial shockers of the ‘new French extreme’, particularly Alexandre Aja’s Switchblade Romance (aka: High Tension, 2003), and Moreau and Palud’s Them (2006), but Revenge deftly avoids the usual soul-crushing nihilism of many comparable slasher movies. There is plenty of genuinely artistic talent displayed here, on both sides of the camera.

Jen eventually adopts a bandit-babe guise for a lengthy and suspenseful finale, that soon follows time-honoured traditions of The Most Dangerous Game (1932), and its numerous imitators, and wild westerns like Hannie Caulder (1971), yet without any gun-training for the homicidal heroine. When this movie promotes feminism with all the timelessness of a modern fable, about ‘a woman scorned’, wreaking a savage vengeance upon hunters who are now hunted targets, its outcome is not in doubt. Despite an element of predictability, the full extent of its bloodily theatrical showdown is new movie-making of richly dramatic greatness.

Disc extras:

• Out For Blood - interview with Coralie Fargeat and Matilda Lutz (45 minutes)
• The Coward - interview with actor Guillaume Bouchede
• Fairy Tale Violence - interview with cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert
• Death Notes - interview with composer Robin Coudert
• Commentary track by Kat Ellinger