Revenge

Made infa­mous by Meir Zarchi’s 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave, the rape revenge sub­genre has occu­pied a par­tic­u­lar niche in hor­ror cin­e­ma for decades now. In the wake of Time’s Up and #MeToo, it seems only fit­ting that a female film­mak­er should set about sub­vert­ing this prob­lem­at­ic area of cin­e­ma which sees women defined by the sex­u­al vio­lence they under­go at the hands of the patriarchy.

As such, Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge appears – upon first glance – a wel­come ton­ic, pur­port­ing to reframe a woman’s sto­ry of abuse at the hands of a group of vio­lent men as a fem­i­nist tale of empow­er­ment. Things start off as they always do, with an attrac­tive young woman, Jen (played by Matil­da Lutz), trav­el­ling to a remote desert pad with her lover, a hand­some, mar­ried with chil­dren French mil­lion­aire named Richard (Kevin Janssens).

Their roman­tic get­away is rude­ly inter­rupt­ed by the ear­ly arrival of Richard’s pals Stan (Vin­cent Colombe) and Dim­itri (Guil­laume Bouchède), who join him for a hunt­ing trip. When the lech­er­ous Stan takes a shine to Jen, things quick­ly go south and our hero­ine finds her­self in a world of trou­ble. But, as expect­ed, the hunters soon become the hunted.

Revenge will inevitably be com­pared to its pre­de­ces­sors, and indeed Jen to the female pro­tag­o­nists of I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left and even Kill Bill. Yet while Jen is shown to have com­mand of her sex­u­al­i­ty, there’s very lit­tle sense of who she is beyond this. In an ear­ly scene she dis­cuss­es her ambi­tions, which extend only as far as want­i­ng ​“to be noticed”. Her body is a weapon – Fargeat ham­mers this mes­sage home – but it’s dif­fi­cult to see how she is any dif­fer­ent from the numer­ous under­de­vel­oped female char­ac­ters who have come before her.

This is a promis­ing debut fea­ture from Fargeat, with some impres­sive, gory prac­ti­cal effects and Robrecht Heyvaert’s crisp cin­e­matog­ra­phy ren­der­ing the bar­ren set­ting in dreamy shades of yel­low and orange. The film’s tri­umph is its cli­mac­tic scene, which plays out like a reimag­in­ing of Mary Harron’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho. But it’s not enough to jus­ti­fy 90 min­utes of unremit­ting mis­ery. Rather than breath­ing life into a stag­nant sub­genre, Revenge dis­ap­point­ing­ly offers more of the same.