Revenge, 2017
A young woman named Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) arrives via helicopter to an extravagant desert vacation home with her married lover, Richard (Kevin Janssens). But a fun and sexy weekend goes awry when two of Richard's friends, Dimi (Guillaume Bouchede) and Stan (Vincent Colombe) arrive. When Richard leaves for a few hours, Jen is horrifically assaulted, and when she is unwilling to take a payoff to "forget" what happened, the men leave her brutally injured in the desert.
For the first 30 minutes of this film, I kept thinking over and over about
Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's anti-death penalty documentary. In the documentary, Herzog doesn't center his argument on some poor, innocent man who has been railroaded and injustly sentenced to die. He centers his argument on a man who not only is definitely guilty, but who committed a horrible crime and doesn't seem to have any remorse about it. The details of the crime, including heartbreaking crime-scene footage are shown. And this is the man Hergoz uses to try and argue that the death penalty is wrong.
So how does that connect to
Revenge? Put simply, Jen is a "bad" victim of sexual assault. From the misogynist/victim-blaming point of view she does everything wrong.
Everything. She knows that Richard is cheating on his wife and she doesn't care. She seems to partly be with him because it will help advance her career. After Dimi and Stan arrive, she continues to dance around the house in revealing, skimpy outfits. She performs a sexy dance for all of the men. She flirts aggressively with them. She laughs at their jokes. She lets them touch her. The next day when one of the men is confused by her suddenly cold demeanor, she is rude and ignores him. When he explicitly confronts her about why she suddenly doesn't like him, she says that he is "too small."
And yet. All of these actions combined are clearly not deserving of the assault that she endures. It is a glorious middle finger to the idea that outrage should be reserved for the victims who "did everything right." Even if Jen had covered up and acted shy and reserved, would things have turned out any different? Does it matter? Does wounded pride ever justify the injury of another person?
Rape/revenge movies are kind of a horror/thriller staple and I have seen more than my fair share. This film systematically subverted every trope that I tend to dislike in the subgenre. To begin with, the actual assault is kept off-screen. The build up to it is long and tense and profoundly uncomfortable. But the camera chooses to follow another character, who literally closes a door on the rape and goes to eat a snack in the kitchen, turning up the TV to drown out Jen's screams. The film takes its time establishing the unsettling dynamic between Jen and the men, but does not wallow in the rape itself. There are times when Jen's body is on display, but her attack is not one of them. The film's focus is more on "how does this happen?" than "Hey, let's watch this happen." There's also (from the first 5 minutes and something that immediately made me suspect a woman directed the movie) a shocking degree of parity when it comes to the nudity on screen. Jen's final showdown is with a nude, bloodied antagonist, and it is both frightening and also right-feeling that he is the one in a primal, exposed state.
From a revenge point of view, the film exists after the first 30 minutes in a sort of heightened reality. Jen loses an absurd amount of blood. She survives a fall from a ridiculous height. She treats her wounds in ways that I won't give away, but that are equally bonkers. Fortunately, the "reality" of the cat-and-mouse game in the desert is consistent. Everyone seems to follow the same rules of strength, endurance, and speed. The action/fight sequences are a bloody mess, and they only get more graphic and more splatter-y as the film progresses. I mean, I kind of loved it.
It's also interesting to see the way that 80% of the character development is of the three men. Their interactions with each other are illuminating, and the different men seem to embody different facets of predation. Stan, who actually commits the rape, is shocked at Richard's brutal treatment of Jen after and even suggests that it's not too late to take her to a hospital and claim everything was an accident. Dimi is the indifferent bystander, turning his back on the crime but also happy to help keep Jen quiet. Richard is the embodiment of entitlement, and the film really captures the way that he is so quickly able to characterize Jen as the enemy who wants to destroy his life and his family. When Richard discovers Jen has been attacked, his anger is not because it's horrible that she was raped, but rather because now this is a mess that he has to clean up.
From a style point of view, it is undeniable that the film looks absolutely fantastic. From the shot of Jen and Richard departing the helicopter to a shot of her bubblegum pink nails grabbing his butt as they start to have sex, the angles and colors of the movies are incredibly bold. There are blunt shots using the blue and pink tinted windows in the home, used to frame certain characters as predators or prey. The desert landscape provides a gorgeous, saturated palate against which Jen's blue shirt and the copious amounts of blood are able to pop. All of the colors are turned up to 11, and it only adds to the dream/nightmare-like vibe of the last 3/4 of the movie. There are also some interesting repeated visuals, such as characters walking alongside bodies of water.
There's also a really bold choice that I loved that is sort of a spoiler (a stylistic one not a narrative one), which is that Jen
WARNING: spoilers below
does not speak (that I remember) after she is pushed off the cliff. I almost wondered, at times, if there was meant to be a supernatural element. There are several moments in which it seems she is being "reborn". But even without words, it is interesting the way that she is able to dominate.
does not speak (that I remember) after she is pushed off the cliff. I almost wondered, at times, if there was meant to be a supernatural element. There are several moments in which it seems she is being "reborn". But even without words, it is interesting the way that she is able to dominate.
Probably not for everyone, but it was a perfect midnight movie for me.