Mark Reviews Movies: RETALIATION

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 23, 2020

For such a significant amount of the movie's length, the filmmakers of Retaliation deftly and empathetically place us within the experience of a man who has been dealing with unspoken trauma for the majority of his life. It's not just the pain of the memories that haunts him. His entire existence and potential in life has been irreparably damaged.

Malky (Orlando Bloom), who was sexually abused by the parish priest when he was 12, lost that innocent way in which children trust others and look up to adults who treat them as someone special. Now, he can't trust anyone. He treats his ailing mother more as an obligation than as his only remaining family. Malky doesn't go to church anymore. Instead, he tears them down as a job.

At a bar, trying to enjoy the company of his friends and the woman he has been dating on and off for years, Malky spots a familiar tuft of grayish white hair on an older man's head. He becomes lost in the sight, leaves the bar suddenly, and returns to his apartment, where he essentially violates himself until the memory, the pain, the grief, the guilt, or all of it disappears or is sated.

The movie, directed by Ludwig and Paul Shammasian (credited as "the Shammasian Brothers"), puts us so deeply in this mindset that there seems to be no way out for Malky. Geoff Thompson's screenplay clearly wants us to feel that, in the way it delves into the character's attitudes and behavior. It's a pointed, discomforting character study, slightly and then increasingly diminished as Malky considers and repeatedly delays vengeance on the man who destroyed him. It all leads up to a final confrontation and epilogue that somehow, despite how thoughtful and insightful the movie's early sections are, seems to do everything wrong.

Before seeing that man in the bar, Malky's past is more present in his mind than usual. The demolition company he works for is in the process of tearing down his old church. His mother (Anne Reid) disapproves, but she has disapproved of Malky for at least 25 years now—since the day he returned to tell her that church's pastor had abused him. He still takes care of her, and her stubbornness and ability to guilt her son have worn him down to a quiet shell around her.

She doesn't believe him about the priest now, when Malky sees a newspaper article proclaiming the priest's return to a church in the area, and therefore, we know she didn't believe him then. We don't realize the extent of her disbelief until late in the story, when Malky gives two monologues that put into clear-cut words everything the movie has so thoroughly established through silence and minimal action.

There are a few other important relationships here, including Malky's girlfriend Emma (Janet Montgomery), who adores him but whose affection he constantly sabotages. After seeing Emma getting a ride from a guy friend, Malky ignores her for weeks, returns to the bar expecting a tidy reconciliation, and then accuses her of being sexually involved with the friend. Malky's best friend Jo (Alex Ferns) tries to play peacemaker between them, since he knows his pal is as loyal as he is troubled, but even the friend gets in the way of Malky's rising rage. Paul (Charlie Creed-Miles), a street preacher who is also a survivor of sexual abuse (for which he took revenge), tries to guide Malky toward faith and forgiveness.

Malky is planning revenge, stalking the priest and carving his own name into a mallet that he keeps on him, and the screenplay (expanded from a 2008 short by Thompson and the directors) continuously postpones the protagonist from taking action, contriving assorted reasons—from a sudden interruption, a couple trips to the hospital, to a death. Meanwhile, though, it attempts to further explore Malky's trauma and conflict—between wanting vengeance and, from Paul's story, suspecting it won't help him. Bloom's performance is commendably restrained—a tough exterior repressing grief, guilt, and rage until it erupts without warning. As transparent as those aforementioned monologues in the third act may be, Bloom delivers them with the same feeling of necessity as the character's moments of violence.

Thompson, of course, is building toward a climactic moment, in which Malky must finally choose between revenge and, based on the terms established in the movie, forgiveness. As for the considerable problems with how things play out, to start, it feels like a false choice, as simplistically founded as Malky's character is complex.

Thompson doesn't help matters by trying to achieve both outcomes. To even attempt to achieve this means that the movie has to hasten the conclusion of one character's story, while oddly expanding another character's in a most unwelcome way. Retaliation ultimately and unconvincingly sees justice as a kind of divine right, unobtainable by ordinary people (Systems of law don't even figure into the calculation, strangely). Surely, the filmmakers believe they've found a satisfactory, slightly ironic solution to the story. The movie's final shot seems to observe another child witnessing that justice, but after everything we've seen here, it just looks like another cycle of trauma about to begin.

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