Mark Reviews Movies: REVENGE (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 10, 2018

Coralie Fargeat's Revenge serves as proof that a movie's story is secondary to how it tells that story. Here, we're provided with a tale of, naturally, revenge—namely a woman getting revenge on three men. One rapes her. Another allows the rape to occur. The third orchestrates a cover-up of the crime that involves trying to murder the woman.

These stories are tricky and, more often than not, antithetically turn the woman of the story into a character who's alternately a powerless victim or a powerful monster of sorts. There's little that's human about such a character, who becomes entirely defined by the crime perpetrated against her. In her first feature, Fargeat seemingly recognizes that contradiction, in which a woman only becomes empowered by becoming a victim, as well as the idea that such a character in a story like this ultimately only serves two roles: as a victimized object of sexual violence and a vengeance-seeking machine. Her protagonist fits into this narrative norm, but the character also transcends it in a few, significant ways.

The woman is named Jen (Matilda Lutz), and at the start, she is little more than an object within the story and from the perspective of Fargeat's camera. She's the mistress of Richard (Kevin Janssens), a married man of wealth with two kids, including a new baby whose cries can be heard in the background during his regular, pleasant calls to his wife. Jen isn't much more than a plaything for Richard, who flies out with her in a helicopter to his remote estate in the middle of the desert. Almost immediately upon arriving at the big house, Jen is in some state of undress—either her underwear or a bikini.

The movie goes along with her status in Richard's eyes, and it continues with the arrival of two other men, Richard's friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), who have come a day early for the pals' annual hunting expedition in the wilderness. The camera lingers behind Jen from a low angle as she walks around the house in her bikini. It follows her underwater as she swims. When she dances for the guys, the views are in close-up as she bends over and at enough distance that we can see her grinding her body against Stan. Richard and Dimitri ogle the sight of what the former believes he possesses and the latter clearly wishes he could.

There's not much more to Jen in these early moments, save for her saying that her dream is to move to Los Angeles one day to be discovered. The guys think this is a good idea. After all, how could she not be noticed? Stan and Dimitri have spent the few hours they've known her in a constant state of noticing her.

While Richard's away, Stan offers Jen his business card. She turns him down, and he responds with insecurity. What's wrong with him? She says that he isn't her type. Why isn't he her type? She prefers taller men. Why wasn't his height an issue when she dancing with him? It's clear there's no correct answer here. Soon enough, Stan is shoving his hand down Jen's underwear and pulling it off, and after Dimitri sees this and walks away, Stan proceeds to rape her.

This is, obviously, the turn for Jen, who wants to leave. Richard offers her some cash and a new house in Canada in exchange for her silence. She runs away, and at the edge of a cliff, Richard pushes her. She lands with a sickening thud and crack on a tree, and the guys head off on their hunting trip, planning to dispose of the body when they're finished.

Jen survives, of course, and the rest of the film follows the four characters as the men hunt her, the woman evades them, Jen decides that she'll have to stop her predators, and the guys discovering that she's more than up to that task. What's key to the film being more than just some exploitative thriller is how Fargeat acknowledges and twists the story's elements of exploitation. Jen spends the majority of the back-and-forth chase in her underwear, but her accessories—a knife holster, a shotgun, and an ammo belt slung across her shoulder—as well as the level of dirt and grime and blood over her body, subvert what could have been a sexualized outfit. Fargeat is strategic with her shots, too, staying in close-ups of Jen's face or maneuvering the camera in such a way that it no longer lingers on the character's body.

Our protagonist is resourceful, too, and not in such a way that her plans seem to come from nowhere. We can follow her thought process as she fights back or devises ambushes against her pursuers. Jen doesn't become some murderous monster. She's the men's equal, using the fact that they aren't expecting her to go after them as a way to even her odds.

In the simpler terms of the film's success as a thriller, this focus on strategy helps immensely. Fargeat follows both sides—Jen and the men—of the film's encounters, including a standoff on a rocky, hillside road and grisly game of cat-and-mouse in the house, which subversively turns the man into the naked, vulnerable party. We're always aware of the opponents' positions to each other, the means by which each party is attempting to get the upper hand, and the ways that the tables keep turning over and over again.

The results are bloody and graphic, with squirm-inducing scenes of self-surgery and violence, but considering the stakes, that seems like fair-enough play. There's still a certain level of unease in the basic premise of this story, which uses the abuse of a woman as a means of creating some thrills, but at least the thrills of Revenge aren't cheap.

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