Revenge (2017 film)

Revenge is a 2017 French rape and revenge action thriller film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and starring Matilda Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe and Guillaume Bouchède. The plot follows a young woman who is raped and left for dead in the desert by three men, where she recovers and seeks vengeance upon her attackers.

Revenge had its world premiere on 11 September 2017 at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival, as part of the Midnight Madness section. The film was released theatrically in France on 7 February 2018 by Rezo Films.

Plot
Jen and Richard take a chartered helicopter to his secluded, luxury vacation home in the desert. Jen is a young, beautiful American who wants to move to Los Angeles to be someone. She seduces him, and afterwards, he calls his wife to check in. The next morning, Richard's friends Stan and Dimitri arrive early for their hunting vacation with Richard. Richard is forced to introduce Jen to them, as he was planning on her leaving before they arrived. That night, the four of them party, and Jen dances a sexy routine. When Richard declines to dance with her, she has fun doing a seductive dance with Stan.

Jen awakes to Richard being away for the morning and Stan becoming more and more aggressive with his advances. When she refuses, he rapes her. Dimitri is invited to join, but he refuses and ignores the rape. Richard returns, berates Stan, and offers Jen money to go live in Canada. Jen demands to go home, and when he resists, she threatens to reveal their relationship to Richard's wife if he does not call her the helicopter immediately. Richard slaps Jen, and she runs off into the desert, pursued by the three men. Cornering Jen at a cliff, Richard pushes her off, and she is impaled on a dead tree branch. The trio returns to the house, planning to retrieve her body after getting ready for their day of hunting.

Jen regains consciousness, and while bleeding, she is able to painfully free herself, but with a piece of the tree branch still stuck through her torso. When the men return, she hides. Night falls, and they track her bloody trail to a river, where they split up. Jen catches Dimitri alone, but he gets the upper hand, and while he is drowning her, she grabs his hunting knife and stabs him in the eye. He dies in the river. She takes his weapon and supplies, and hides in a cave. She remembers she has Richard's peyote and takes it all. She then painlessly uses the knife to cut out the tree branch and heats a beer can in the fire to cauterize the wound. The artwork on the can leaves a perfect scar/tattoo of a phoenix on her belly. After a series of nightmares of the men hunting her, Jen awakes and sets out with the gun.

Richard and Stan discover and dispose of Dimitri's body. They split up in separate vehicles to search the mountainside for Jen. Jen spots Stan first and ambushes him when he is refilling the SUV. After a grueling, bloody gunfight, Jen kills him and takes the SUV.

After not being able to contact Stan on the radio, an angry, exhausted Richard rides his motorcycle back to the house and calls the helicopter for immediate pickup. In the shower, he hears a noise, and while naked, he searches for Jen with his rifle. Jen finds him first, and when he dives for cover, she shoots him in the stomach. The two chase each other around the house with shotguns as Richard's blood covers every floor and wall. Richard finally overpowers her, and while strangling her, she shoves her hand into his stomach wound. Jen recovers her shotgun and kills him. A bloodied but triumphant Jen walks out of the house as she hears the helicopter approach.

Cast

 * Matilda Lutz as Jen
 * Kevin Janssens as Richard
 * Vincent Colombe as Stan
 * Guillaume Bouchède as Dimitri
 * Jean-Louis Tribes as Roberto

Development
Coralie Fargeat was inspired to make a revenge film in the vein of Mad Max or Rambo, "with strong characters on a phantasmagoric journey". Though Fargeat was aware of the rape and revenge film genre, she did not set out to make a film of that type and had never seen I Spit on Your Grave, one of the most well-known films of the genre. Said Fargeat, "I wanted to take this story out of the genre of horror. I didn't want Jen to be screaming and suffering for the whole movie, trying to survive. I wanted her to go somewhere else and transform into a cool and badass character." One of Fargeat's inspirations was the Steven Spielberg film Duel because it manages to generate tension using "so few elements: a car, a truck and that's it".

Filming
Revenge was filmed at a Moroccan location, chosen for the nondescript, isolated appearance of its desert. Said Fargeat, "We had to find the villa, the desert, and the water in the same country. I loved the idea of not being able to recognize exactly where the desert is." A small village in the background of the villa was not filmed "to create the sense that the characters in the film are totally alone".

Principal photography on the film began on 6 February and wrapped on 21 March 2017.

Of the film's early scenes that view Jen through a male gaze and show her dancing with men, Fargeat said this was done because she "wanted to embrace the fascinating, polarising image of the Lolita. Jen can be empty and stupid and an object of desire if she wants. It shouldn't lead to [a sexual assault]." Fargeat also chose not to linger too much on the rape scene, saying, "For me that's not what the film's about. So I didn't feel the need to make it visually important. Before she is raped, she's told it's her fault, that she created the situation. I wanted to deal with the psychological and verbal violence towards her — the rape is symbolic of the way she's considered and treated."

Release
The film had its world premiere at the 42nd Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2017. Prior to that, Shudder acquired distribution rights to the film. It was later revealed Neon would distribute the film theatrically in the United States, before its release on Shudder.

The film was released in France on 7 February 2018 by Rezo Films. It was released in the United States on 11 May 2018, in a limited release and through video on demand.

Critical response
Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 81 out of 100, based on 23 critics.

TheWrap praised Revenge for its subversion of rape and revenge tropes and embraced the film as a welcome addition to the genre from a female lens. Andrew Whalen of Newsweek said the film is "the closest thing to a feminist rape-revenge tale since Abel Ferrara Ms. 45". A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote, "Blunt, bloody and stylish almost in spite of itself, 'Revenge' is a synthesis of exploitation and feminism". Some critics compared the film to French New Extremity films like High Tension and Martyrs. Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com awarded the film three and a half out of four and wrote, "with cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, Fargeat has created a high-contrast hellscape, a place filled with equal amounts of danger and discovery".

Among the tropes that TheWrap wrote Fargeat subverts were past films' tendency to focus on the violence done to the victim. Writing for Variety, Scott Tobias commented, "The small miracle of 'Revenge', an exceptionally potent and sure-handed first feature by French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, is that it adheres to the formula yet feels invigorating and new, a stylistic tour-de-force that also tweaks the sexual politics in meaningful ways." Lemire wrote, "Fargeat subverts and co-opts the male gaze, turning it into something that's both playful and fierce." TheWrap April Wolfe appreciated that the character of Jen was nuanced and multilayered, mixing "bravada" and "vulnerability". Lutz was also lauded for her performance, with Tobias saying she rises to the emotional challenge and gives a "physical presence that's indomitable, like a blade forged in fire", and Lemire writing she is able to "[indicate] a massive character arc without many words".

Revenge was also noted for its larger focus on the theme of rebirth. David Sims of The Atlantic wrote, "winking title aside, this is a movie more about transformation and transference than revenge...Fargeat is taking familiar, misogynistic iconography and setting it to boil, bringing all its cruelty and noxiousness to the surface. Revenge won't be an experience every viewer can handle, but as a piece of extreme horror, it's an intelligent and flashy debut." Lemire commented that the process of Jen's survival "requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief", although "Fargeat definitely emphasizes the 'fantasy' element of the rape-revenge fantasy genre, not only through Jen's resourcefulness but also with the dreamlike way in which she depicts her journey toward regaining control."

In a more critical review, Lena Wilson of Slate questioned whether the film can still be considered feminist if it conforms to rape and revenge film tropes, citing Jen's skimpy costuming throughout the film as an example. Wilson argued, "If rape is the pinnacle of male disregard for female life, what do we accomplish by presenting a protagonist who gleans and internalizes that violent indifference? Our protagonist is transformed, but she converts from one male fantasy to another: wide-eyed damsel to hardened action hero." Kevin Maher of The Times voiced a similar sentiment: "Labelled a 'feminist rape-revenge movie', it takes all the traditional tenets of that most dubious of genres and simply does them again."