BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL: “Revenge” is the first feature from French director Coralie Fargeat. It’s an impressive film in many ways, but the fact that this is Fargeat’s first movie is truly staggering. The confidence and self-assuredness on display in every frame of “Revenge” speaks to Fargeat’s explosive competence; “Revenge” is a blockbuster debut, and if all is right in the world, Fargeat will be making movies for a very long time to come.
“Revenge” has been categorized by some as a “rape-revenge” film. This is inaccurate. It is a survival film. The distinction has a difference: Fargeat’s protagonist, Jen (Matilda Lutz), is raped by her boyfriend’s hunting buddy in the film’s early going, but immediately after the rape all she wants to do is go home. She’s not interested in revenge, she doesn’t care about her rapist’s future, she’s deep in shock and just wants to go home. It’s not until her boyfriend attempts to murder her to cover up the rape that Jen takes up arms against the men who want her dead.
Fargeat doesn’t reveal much about Jen’s background. She’s introduced to us as the sexy aspiring-actress mistress of a wealthy Frenchman, Richard (Kevin Janssens), as she accompanies him to a desert retreat for a hunting weekend. Richard and Jen are accompanied by Richard’s two hunting buddies: Vincent Colombe’s Stan, an insecure man who jealously watches Jen flirt with Richard; and Guillaume Bouchède’s Dimitri, a lumbering grotesque who doesn’t indulge in the “Jen” fantasy beyond staring at her butt as she walks away. When Richard makes the mistake of leaving Jen alone in the house with Stan and Dimitri for a mere two hours, Stan follows Jen into her bedroom and rapes her.
“Revenge” is a heavily stylized film, but Fargeat’s boldest cinematic choice might simply be to have the camera leave the room while Jen is being raped; the camera follows the complicit Dimitri instead, who turns up the volume on the TV to drown out Jen’s screams. While this ultimately softens the impact of the sexual violence, it puts an exclamation point on Dimitri’s complicity and subverts our expectations to unsettling effect.
Richard eventually returns home to find a traumatized Jen lying in bed, begging to go home. He immediately realizes what has happened, but refuses to let Jen go home—he has a wife and kids and is worried about Jen going to the authorities. Richard tells Jen that he found her a job in Canada (“it’s practically Los Angeles!”), but she doesn’t want a job in Canada. Jen threatens to tell his wife about their affair if Richard doesn’t let her go home. Richard doesn’t take well to being threatened: he slaps her, hard, eliciting the first trickle of blood in a film that will expend gallons of the stuff by the time credits roll.
Fargeat’s visuals are stunning. Her shot compositions and framing choices are inspired, and her thematic visual motifs are cool and far from overbearing. She returns occasionally to the image of a decaying apple, always at opportune moments, infrequently enough to avoid being annoying. There’s a lot of gross-out imagery here too; “Revenge” has what are sure to be two of the year’s most disgusting shots, which will definitely not be spoiled here.
Fargeat has more on her mind than exhilarating horror cinema (although there is a lot of exhilarating horror cinema in “Revenge”). Many have already pointed to the film’s social commentaries on rape culture and male entitlement, but there’s an even more unconventional throughline here about male entitlement as it relates to male attractiveness. It’s difficult to miss the fact that the film’s three male characters represent three starkly different degrees of male physical attractiveness: Richard is an ideal male specimen, just a straight-up hot dude, which no doubt helped him achieve success in his career and relationships. Stan is a middling sort of guy, a normal man with unintentional facial hair and an emerging paunch, who certainly could never coast on his looks. Dimitri is a slovenly mess who has basically given up and has long since internalized the fact that he’s not even in the same game as Richard. He never imagines for a second that Jen would be interested in him. When he walks in on Stan raping Jen, Stan offers to let him join in. Dimitri declines and goes swimming instead.
But let’s not forget about our protagonist! Jen is a pretty outstanding character—while she inevitably gets to that point of superheroic physical strength that any survival-movie protagonist must in order to survive their survival movie, her journey to that point is pretty astonishing. The violence she doles out as the movie rolls along is as cathartic as it is bloody.
Lutz’s performance is terrific: even when Jen does develop her vague horror-movie super strength, Lutz continues to play the character’s shock and trauma in every frame. Jen is just a terrified, innocent girl who finds herself in the unfortunate situation of having to push through several horrifying physical injuries to kill three men if she ever wants to get home again. Jen is an admirably grounded protagonist for such a superbly heightened movie; that the character works so well is due in no small part to Lutz’s thoughtful performance.
The film’s bloody ending is frustrating on the one hand, because it’s so satisfying imagining a film like “Revenge” concluding with Jen simply going to the authorities and sending Richard to jail (and divorce court) forever. But this was never a movie that was going to end with anything other than vicious violence and copious amounts of fake blood, and the way Fargeat stages the film’s climax is awe-inspiring.
The fact that this is Fargeat’s first film is exciting, as it means we’re at the very start of a truly insane cinematic career from a brand-new French action auteur. “Revenge” is a hugely satisfying horror movie, a real achievement on the parts of all involved. [A-]
For those wanting a brief taste of this great horror film, take a look at the intense red band trailer below: