Never take your mistress on an annual guys’ getaway, especially one devoted to hunting — a violent lesson for three wealthy married men, in writer-director Coralie Fargeat's feature debut.
Soaking the perennial rape/revenge thriller in a strikingly hypnotic style, writer-director Coralie Fargeat's compelling feature debut reframes the genre's typical proclivities with a gaze that scrutinizes male bodies and foregrounds its protagonist's transformation into a hardened vehicle of vengeance. It's a potent gambit, and one that permits its upsetting premise to assume a wry sense of humour as it careens towards a cathartic climax of outrageously bloody retribution and a rather practical use of Saran Wrap.
Evoking Kubrick's Lolita, Jen (a lollipoppin' Matilda Lutz), arrives at a remote desert villa with her millionaire Adonis boy toy (Kevin Jannsens) for a weekend of romantic (and illicit) frivolity. Things go south quickly when her lover's unseemly hunting pals show up and make inappropriate advances that escalate into an outright assault. The men quickly try to sweep their attack under the rug, but Jen won't have it and, well… hell hath no fury....
Photographed with a blinding sunbleached palette of orange and teal that recalls Mad Max: Fury Road, Revenge plunges Jen into an arid, drug-induced hell, but one she resolves to emerge from, leaving a tidal wave of gory violence in her wake.
PETER KUPLOWSKY