3 out of 5

Directed by: Coralie Fargeat

Much more learned folks than I have dived in to the Whys of there even being a “rape revenge” genre in the first place; that it exists as a thing to be iterated on by films like Caroline Fargeat’s Revenge is surely due to a mix of damning and interesting cultural, historical, and social frameworks, with the movie being a “solid” entry into that scene, whether you include those frameworks or not.

Billed as a feminist take on the genre, and coming out post MeToo, one might expect a certain slant to the film, and it is there… but in an appreciably more top-down format, allowing one to view the movie through that lens only if desired. Flirtations trigger men to become pigs; a girl is assaulted; she responds. Those are the pieces of rape revenge, and they’re still in place. However, by shifting the narrative and point of view slightly, Revenge gets to be a bloody (very bloody) thriller first, then genre second.

Jen (Matilda Lutz) is spending the weekend with her married boyfriend, Richard (Kevin Janssens), at a remote vacation house. She’s American; he’s French. She prances around in a pink baby T and underwear, and titters when he calls her ass a peach. She’s initially shocked by the appearance of two of Richard’s friends, Stan and Dimitri (Vincent Colombe and Guillaume Bouchède), who’ve arrived early for a hunting trip, but she soon revels in the extra attention, dancing purposefully provocatively, and laughing away further ogling comments. A question about her desire to be in LA pretty much echoes this: she knows only that it’s nice having eyes on you.

While I think the editing and pacing of this setup shows off some of the film’s flaws, it is also an incredibly important piece of rewriting rape-revenge into something palatable and not cringily messaged: this is the extent of Jen’s personality we get to know and see. There is no huge backstory, or reframing her sexuality to empowerment, or even avoiding that ogling – we get plenty of booty shots, and provocative lip-smacking. In other words, this would be film (and, sigh, reality) definition of “she deserved it,” which her later attacker essentially says.

Why is this a change? How is this “feminist”?

In your standard r-r, the girl is displayed as a sex object regardless of her personality, and she’s normally presented in some more “innocent” fashion. Maybe she was skinny dipping, or picnicking in revealing clothes, but oh golly, she was just carefree until these brutes came along… This stratifies the roles in such movies 100% – evil villains; naive, implied virgin – and also slathers the film in assumed male gaze. In “Revenge,” we don’t get that layer of innocence in any way, and while Jen might be considered naive, she is allowed to be sexual, and in charge of that sexuality. The setup is a challenge: Can you not see that this – the rape – is deplorable, and never deserved? Fargeat also structurally establishes the movie’s skew on violence, as we are not shown the act itself; Revenge is, as mentioned, very bloody, but it saves its exploitation for the cat and mouse of the after effects.

These are the appreciated pluses. The bulk of the film is an extended chase in the desert, with shotguns and knives. Some surrealism is purposefully applied by Fargeat to give Jen the peyote spirit visions necessary for turning into our avenging lead, but at the same time, she doesn’t outright become Rambo, and mostly presents a case for doing what she can with what she knows.

But execution-wise…? I dunno man. Revenge seemed pretty average to me, and even self-defeating at points. The cinematography is crisp, nibbing its nighttime neons from Drive, but it often feels without purpose, like there’s no real visual style to the film – or rather, there is, but it’s superficial. The sharpness of the colors and light in the day feel separate from scenes’ moods; i.e. the Drive look is just applied to look cool. You could make a case for that superficiality being tied to the themes, and that theoretically works, but my impression is it wasn’t purposeful – there’s too much attempted symbolism for that. And if it was purposeful, it’s at the cost of some immersion.

Feeding into my suspicion of style over substance is the editing. Fargeat and her co-editors, Bruno Safar
and Jérôme Eltabet, flip between choppy editing and long pans inconsistently, and in ways that don’t always match the needs of the scene. The entire opening “seduction,” for example, uses both quick cuts and flip-flopping perspective within these cuts in an overly flashy manner that undermines the mood. Like, again, this could be purposeful visual commentary, disrupting male gaze, but it continues on past this point to scenes where it arguably adds no value, thematic or otherwise. We get these choppy moments when we should rest; and longer cuts when it looks cool but doesn’t add information to the scene.

Lastly, just structurally, the conclusion is underwhelming, and moreso reeks of budget limitations than anything else. It makes use of the location, and conceptually it’s great, with some more role reversals / tweaks, but it’s really several minutes of wondering if this is all we’re gonna be doing for the final stretch, and… yup.

Which lands the film back in the middleground. It’s an inspired intention, revitalizing a pretty limited subgenre, but then committing the actual film to odd ways of expressing that intention that end up making the final product feel a bit (unintentionally) shallow.