Can you recommend a movie without telling anyone to actually see it? Because no sane, remotely tasteful person would tell you to watch Revenge (which opens today in select theaters and everywhere on demand). It’s a ludicrously gory, over-the-top, woman-on-a-rampage grindhouse film. It’s also a midnight movie for the #MeToo era, a radical provocation about female power from debut French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat—and I kind of loved it. Here is an exploitation film that turns exploitation upside down.
Serious caveats: To watch Revenge means withstanding buckets of blood, closeups of torn flesh, and gross-out body horror of the early–David Cronenberg variety. Plus the first 20 minutes or so are simple, old-fashioned exploitation: Jen, a beautiful young American woman played by the model-actress Matilda Lutz, is on a desert hunting vacation with three married French men, one of whom she’s sleeping with. She downs champagne, dances for them a tiny skirt, is raped, chased across the desert, pushed off a cliff, and left for dead.
Ew, right? The rape is off screen, but that’s a rare reprieve in a film that forces you to look at things you would rather not. Fargeat shoots her early scenes from a distinctly male-gaze point of view, lingering on Lutz’s body in honeyed light (the film’s palette is lovely, all sandblasted pastels and ocher-blue sky). But this is a set up: In the hour that follows the male gaze will be more or less wiped from the face of the earth.
Nothing here is subtle. Jen transforms from victim into rampaging killer after being impaled on a spearlike branch, which extrudes priapically from her lower abdomen. When she finally extracts it—on peyote (don’t ask)—she seals her gaping wound by campfire, Rambo-style, with a red-hot beer can emblazoned with the image of a phoenix.
Meanwhile the men realize she’s maybe not dead and head out by SUV, ATV, and motorbike to finish her off. Jen turns the tables on them one by one via hunting knife and shotgun. Amid the juvenile gore (head explosions, ears blown off, a foot sliced open) Fargeat crafts scenes of exquisite suspense and ably upends convention by turning macho men into vulnerable victims. Have you ever seen an action film which climaxes with a clothed woman hunting down a fully nude man? That’s the final 15 minutes of Revenge—dueling shotguns, gallons of blood, abundant penis. Call it the female gaze.
