Revenge

Matilda Lutz

Coralie Fargeat's Revenge, her first feature film from 2017, is a gory and effective action thriller. Matilda Lutz portrays Jen, a mistress of a wealthy French man, who has a rendezvous with her lover at an isolated estate in a Moroccan game reserve. Jen's lover is meeting up with two buddies to go hunting, but things do not go as planned. Jen is raped and abused by the three men and, after a fall from a cliff, is left for dead. However, she is very much alive and bent on, yes, revenge. The film eschews plausibility and the characterizations verge on the one dimensional, but Revenge is a tautly constructed film with palpable energy. Fargeat's technical gifts are very much in evidence. Her framing of the action is always interesting and her use of sound, whether it is Mozart, techno or silence, effective.

Fans of Fargeat's second feature, The Substance, will find that her debut has much in common with her sophomore feature. Guillaume Bouchède gulping down of a candy bar as he watches Jen being raped is of a piece with Dennis Quaid's loud mastication of prawns in The Substance. Both films portray men as greedy animals focused wholly on their personal consumption. Predators circling each other's trail. Body horror is a major element in her two features. All four characters in Revenge endure excruciating physical ordeals and Fargeat's camera never flinches. Those looking for nuance and humanist uplift should pass Revenge by, but hardened action fans will enjoy the ferocious carnage. Each of her feature films display Fargeat's talent and craftmanship. It remains to be seen whether her reductive view of humanity will gain depth in time.