Revenge

Revenge (2017) takes place at a holiday house in the desert. A rich man arrives with his mistress, and two friends join them to hunt. After a rape and an attempt to kill her, the woman does not die and comes back across the desert. It is Coralie Fargeat's first feature. She would go on to make The Substance, and that film's entire method is already here: saturated colour, extreme blood, a camera that looks directly at bodies, and genre conventions pushed to their limit. The first twenty minutes deliberately imitate the male gaze, using the classical framings that objectify a woman. Then the same camera turns and applies the same look to the men. That inversion is the film's whole argument. It is a French production, shot entirely in English in Morocco. Matilda Lutz plays the woman. The quantity of blood is deliberately unrealistic, and the producers' statements about how much fake blood the final sequence used became part of the film's publicity. It runs 108 minutes. Good for: a rewriting of the rape and revenge genre, formal nerve, and Fargeat. Less good for: the rape and the violence are extremely heavy. That the film leans on the visual language of the genre it is attacking is contested, and the objection is fair. None of the characters are written in depth; the film is built on an argument rather than on people.