Gory, but brilliant
Jen (a superb Matilda Lutz) and her married lover Richard (Kevin Janssens) are enjoying a romantic weekend in his isolated house in the desert. However, shortly after they arrive, Richard's friends, Stan (Vincent Colombe), Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), and Roberto (Jean-Louis Tribes) show up unannounced, urging Richard to join them on a hunting trip. As tension mounts in the house, Stan rapes Jen, but when she says she is going to go to the police, and to alert Richard's wife of his affair, the men attack her and leave her for dead. However, unbeknownst to them, she survives the assault, and has set on revenge.
Very much in the vein of films such as Sam Peckingpah's Strawdogs (1971) and Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave (1978), Revenge is an insanely gory rape-revenge thriller. In her feature debut, writer/director Coralie Fargeat displays an astonishing visual panache as she reappropriates this exploitative sub-genre for the post :pound_symbol:MeToo era. From the expansive Ford-esque vistas of the desert to the claustrophobic and labyrinthine finale, her visual language is as dexterous and thematically justified as one would expect from a master stylist such as Michael Mann. The film is very much about the dangers and darker implications of the male gaze, and the way Fargeat's constantly moving camera lingers on actress Matilda Lutz's half-naked body is deeply unsettling, challenging the audience to look at her in the same way the male characters do, before turning this notion on its head in the second half of the film. If you can ignore the plot contrivances, and stomach the gore, you will find a socially relevant film that is as auspicious a debut as you're likely to see all year.
If you can suspend your disbelief you might enjoy this revenge movie in the same vein of "I spit on your grave"... but you'll have to be able to suspend it a lot. The movie is beautifully shot but it left me hanging a bit towards the end. The main actor (apparently the Belgian called Kevin Janssens... I did not know!) looked like he was performing try outs for the Rising Dead 2 movie... He would be perfect in the role of Chuck Greene.
All in all this movie doesn't offer anything new and is a bit long-winded towards the end. It didn't quite satisfy but I do not regret seeing it.
Some strange things I picked up during this movie (brain had time to think I guess):
- can't get over that they got the brand wrong. Regardless of all the things that aren't possible in this film... it should have been mirrored
- when's the last time you saw a left-handed person holding a rifle... I haven't... Didn't I pay attention in the past?
- too bad they didn't go a bit more into the mystical of peyote and deserts... would have made the unbelievable stuff more palatable
- I also always set myself on fire when I try to escape being empaled, it's the logical thing to do
- it had to be mirrored... right? REDRUM REEB REEB NACIXEM
Review by andreas0992BlockedParent2022-03-08T06:55:40Z
The premise of the move? Classic revenge flick, sure, nice, I can get behind it, you go girl, get those guys.
But the execution? Super messy nothing made actual sense and it was easy to nitpick, and I'm the type of guy who enjoys turning off his brain and enjoying a movie take place in its own universe with its own rules
Like her falling of the cliff and surviving being impaled is something of this movie universe's rule, not like irl, but I get it and go along with it. Her having literally no background in any form of combat/survival and all pointing toward her being a sugar baby, but all of a sudden she's capable of handling weapons and patching up that huge hole in her abdomen? (X) Doubt. She is capable of outpacing HURT and BAREFOOT in the rocky desert the three guys chasing her on vehicles, all while bleeding enough for 3 people. I touch on this in the tldr, but having weapons in a movie, means you have to have an expert to check on them, to not have an Alec Baldwin situation. Nobody decided to tell the director that it is absurd to have a rifle scope on a shotgun? It didn't even have to be a shotgun, it could have been a rifle, and the story wouldn't have changed literally at all. The ATV ran out of gas pretty quickly, hell even the car guy had to refill, but the motorbike dude could ride for like 2 days without refilling? Did he pull the fuel out of his ass(with which the female director was apparently obsessed with)? Damn I can't understand how this movie gets grades of 9 and 10... There you go, rant over.
Tl;Dr Do you wanna know how absurd this movie is? It has a shotgun...WITH A RIFLE SCOPE. Let that sink in.