Revenge (2017)

Dig two graves

The rape revenge thriller is, historically, one of the scummiest subgenres of films. The most notorious example of the form is the 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave. It presents the formula in simple, horrifying terms: A young woman gets brutally and violently assaulted, then spends the rest of the film hunting down and killing those who perpetrated the cruelty. It’s a nasty film so degrading that Roger Ebert spent his 0-star review belittling audiences who paid money to see it.

Given its provocative nature, it’s little surprise that the trope of a woman taking vengeance for sexual violence has been the subject of much investigation by filmmakers and scholars. It’s a common topic across the high art/low art spectrum: from critically acclaimed dramas through cheap exploitation Tubi trash.

Revenge, the 2017 debut of Coralie Fargeat, is not a subversion of the genre, along the lines of a Promising Young Woman, so much as it as a reclamation. It doesn’t change the broad outline of I Spit on Your Grave one iota, but it makes so many changes big and small within that framework that the end result is utterly transformed.

The film follows Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), a young woman who we learn in some of the film’s very sparse dialogue dreams of becoming an actress. She arrives, sunglass-clad and sucking a lollipop like Kubrick’s Lolita, at the luxurious desert vacation house owned by the wealthy, square-jawed Richard (Kevin Janssens). Richard has a wife and kids, and doesn’t bother hiding from Jen that she’s his side piece. Between bedroom sessions, he’s there for a hunting trip with his buddies.

The morning after a night of drinking and dancing, while Richard is out, one of Richard’s friends, Stan (Vincent Colombe) corners Jen to seduce her. She says “no.” He doesn’t take “no” for an answer. Another of Richard’s friends, Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) declines to intervene, shrugging and retreating to the kitchen with disinterest.

When Jen comes crying to Richard after she’s been raped, even threatening to call his wife and tattle, he retaliates, leaving her bloody and near death, impaled on a phallic tree branch. Very slowly, she escapes and stumbles towards both survival and that titular dish that will be served hot and scarred rather than cold.

So what separates Revenge from the trashier fare? For starters, the rape in question happens offscreen; cruelly, but quickly and without becoming the subject of the film’s gaze. Compare this to the 30 minutes of onscreen rape in I Spit On Your Grave; it doesn’t take a media studies doctorate to find the latter problematic at best; abhorrent and unwatchable more accurately.

Second, Revenge avoids making its villains backwater redneck trash. From Deliverance through I Spit On Your Grave and beyond, the perpetrators of sexual violence in cinema are often deranged, uneducated, quasi-human lower-class scum. The caricatured, deviant nature of these characters make their crimes seem less human, less like something that could happen to a normal person in a normal place. In Revenge, it’s a family man and a wealthy businessman, handsome and stoic, who betrays Jen; one of his lackeys who violates her without pushback or punishment. By making the villains more believable, more “respectable,” hiding in plain sight, it makes their crimes more immediate and scary.

Third, and most importantly to the arthouse audience the film is aiming for, Fargeat applies truly remarkable filmmaking. Shot after shot is a gorgeous piece of composition and color and lighting and cinematography. Early candy-coated hues transform into the sprawling desert vistas, which alternate with grimy, bloody, swampy viscera. The gore effects, especially the buckets of shining fake blood, are bravura levels of squirm-inducing. There’s a hallucinatory, fantasy quality to the film’s second and third acts, as if everything we’re seeing could be an imagined death rattle rather than reality. It’s amplified with some phenomenal sound design, punctuating the violence and danger and catharsis.

Lutz herself is a marvel as Jen; Fargeat frames her not with sexiness or eroticism but with admiration, as if she is Michaelangelo’s female David. She strafes around like an N64 Goldeneye character, her rifle planted on her shoulder, erect and dangerous. It’s a striking image.

Revenge is a satisfying film and gets quite far in its mission of transforming the rape revenge thriller into something… not quite rah-rah feminist, but at least less dispiritingly vulgar. The dark parts are indeed painful, but the end brings real catharsis. Bloody absolution. I’m very curious to see what Fargeat does in her sophomore effort, this year’s The Substance.

It’s still bound exactly to its logline, but Revenge is pretty close to the best possible version of this story, shallow and tawdry though that narrative is.

Is It Good?

Good (5/8)

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