[FILM GUTTER REVIEWS] REVENGE (2017) DIR. CORALIE FARGEAT

I really don’t want to put any of this rating at the feet of its star Matilda Lutz (although the guys in the movie don’t really excel at all), and there are without a doubt some strong visuals. But the whole thing just comes across as so hard to believe,

REVENGE (2017: A Film Gutter Review by Alex Davis 
​Dir. Coralie Fargeat, 108 mins

Revenge is a movie that hit a few years back and made a fair noise on the festival circuit – on its emergence it seems to receive extremely positive reviews, and it’s one of those that has been on the ‘back burner’ of my list of movies to watch for some time. And with this one being live on Shudder, I figured that it was about time I got round to it. It’s hard to know exactly what put me off, although I do have mixed feelings about the rape-revenge milieu on the whole – it can feel very exploitative, but then again there have been a few good ones in recent years, including the likes of American Mary and Julia. So, would this one fall on the good side or the bad side of the subgenre?

It was interesting looking into the reviews of this movie after the fact, because nobody seemed to fall in the middle – some really liked it as a savage, action-packed revenge thriller, while others found the whole premise and concept awfully hard to believe. Sadly, I fell into that second camp…

So, Revenge follows Jen and her already-married douchebag boyfriend Richard. They’re in a fancy house in the middle of the desert when his two friends arrive for an annual hunting trip, and the part of them take an immediate interest in Jen, leading to an unpleasant rape scene. It’s not as graphic as some, but certainly does make an impact in the way it’s presented. The visuals were one of the strong points of this movie on the whole, in fact, and worthy of note here. When Jen tries to run away she gets shoved off a cliff and impaled on a low tree, only to free herself from that and set out to get revenge on her abusers.

The issue for me is that I simply couldn’t suspend my disbelief sufficiently to enjoy this one – there were numerous moments where the whole thing just felt preposterous, and even if you’re willing to accept that Jen didn’t really feel the pain of the fall or being literally run through by a sharp branch because she’s had some peyote, how she could possibly lose so much blood and continue to live in an unforgiving desert with no medical attention at all? There must be a hole in her stomach at least a couple of inches wide, which seems to be presented as little more than a flesh wound. It was maddening, and honestly as a viewer I checked out from that point – there’s just no way I could take it seriously from then on, which obviously for a movie in this subgenre is a real problem. I should be invested in the quest for vengeance and some form of justice being served, but personally that just wasn’t the case. It really did degenerate into complete nonsense for more that half the runtime, which is a shame as the lead actress is clearly giving it everything. Unfortunately, she just doesn’t have the strong material to back her up, and this one goes down as one of the worse rape-revenge movies of recent times…

RATING: 3/10. I really don’t want to put any of this rating at the feet of its star Matilda Lutz (although the guys in the movie don’t really excel at all), and there are without a doubt some strong visuals. But the whole thing just comes across as so hard to believe, which is a serious problem for a film like this. Some horror can stretch credibility if it is down the road of the monstrous or the supernatural, but a sense of realism is central to the rape-revenge movie, and the minute you stop feeling it could potentially be real it’s gone. This one was basically gone for me at about the halfway mark, and there’s nothing you can do to recover once you tell me so clearly this one it just a film and couldn’t possibly be something that could happen in real life. There might have been something good here without a few extremely poor decisions in the storyline and script, but unfortunately I can’t go any higher than 3/10 with what is presented here.

---

TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE ​

[FEATURE] FINDING GIGANTOPITHECUS BY ASHLEY STOKES

​THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR MOVIE REVIEW WEBSITES