Three men learn the bloodiest lesson ever from a rightfully vengeful woman in Fargeat’s stylish and gleefully exploitative first feature, a lean and mean modern throwback to the New French Extremity movement.

---

---

Hopefully, with the success of The Substance (2024), more cinephiles will go back to Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, which is just as thrilling and bitingly good.  One thing’s for sure, Fargeat sure loves blood and gore a lot, and indeed we have them here by the gallons. 

It’s a wonder how these characters—three men and a woman, all profusely bleeding—are still able to make it through the film far longer than they are expected to. 

That aside, Revenge, as the title plainly spells out, gives us that gleefully exploitative vengeance movie that cult movie lovers would have easily lapped up one or more generations ago, only that this is evidently more stylish and polished, and decidedly more modern. 

A throwback to the New French Extremity movement at the turn of the century where excessive violence comfortably resided, Revenge is about a woman so pissed off (rightfully so) that she decides to take matters into her own hands, though it is also partly out of the sheer desperation to survive. 

After being sexually assaulted by her lover’s hunting pals and even betrayed by her man himself, Jen (Matilda Lutz in kickass, scum extermination mode) has to pick up ‘hunting’ skills very quickly, or she won’t be able to teach the bloodiest lesson of her life. 

“There are three of us, and we’re armed. What are you afraid of?”

At times reminding of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), such is the inhospitable desert terrain where much of Revenge’s lean and mean action is set (and stripped to its barest essentials), Fargeat’s work would have made Furiosa proud. 

But more importantly, the filmmaker finds moments of devilish fun in upending gender codes.  For once, men piss themselves silly, are naked and vulnerable, and outsmarted by the opposite sex. 

Sure, with a rifle in their hands, they remain intimidating—and it is to Fargeat’s credit that she doesn’t give Jen an easy ride until the very end.  There’s real threat and tension, and every close-up of a flesh wound feels gut-churning. 

All that blood reminds us how thin the line is between life and death, between ghastly injustice and triumphant vindication. 

Grade: A-

---

Trailer:

Music: