Coralie Fargeat has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention and accolades for The Substance, so I want to talk about her previous movie instead: Revenge. Around 2018, my then-coworker recommended I check out this super-bloody movie on streaming. I didn’t know anything about the director at the time, but I’m generally a fan of revenge movies. The title had me interested, but by the end of the first act I was totally hooked.
- Directed by: Coralie Fargeat
- Written by: Coralie Fargeat
- Starring: Matilda Lutz. Kevin Janssens. Vincent Colombe
Revenge Done Right
Revenge has a basic “women’s revenge” plot. The main character is raped and later left for dead by very bad men and comes back to make them pay. I’ve seen this story before, and chances are good I’ll watch it again. What impressed me is the style and point of view this version is told with. There is significance in what is shown, as opposed to what is implied. For example, we see lots of sexy shots of the lead, Jen, including her rear, but Richard is the only one we see from the front naked. And fair warning, Richard is naked a lot.
Review and Recap
Jen is spending a few days with her married lover, Richard, in his remote desert mansion. Their romantic rendezvous is ruined by the arrival of his buddies Stan and Dimitri, showing up for a hunting trip. From their introduction, it’s clear to the audience and Jen that the new arrivals are bad news, but since Richard is there, Jen feels safe. She parties and dances with Stan to make Richard jealous. Stan, however, takes things too far. Richard carries her off to bed. The next morning, Richard has left to take care of some business.
All these scenes are inter-cut with footage of an apple with a bite taken out of it, rotting slowly, with ants crawling on it.
Stan makes a move on Jen, and she turns him down. He starts to assault her. Dimitri interrupts them, but only briefly, passively snacking while ignoring the very real crime occurring, and Jen’s obvious distress. This is an instance where Fargeat choosing to show something other than the obvious violence makes the scene more horrific. She focuses on Dimitri’s indifference, following him as we hear the assault in the background. We know he’s aware of it; he turns up the TV so he can’t hear anything. This is so much worse that seeing something we’ve seen in other movies a dozen times before. By focusing on the true evil, instead of the woman’s pain and suffering, Revenge keeps its focus without crossing over into exploitation or fetishizing trauma.
These Men
Richard returns home, and Stan tells him there is a problem with Jen. She’s in bed, traumatized, while the men fight outside. When she wakes up, Richard tells her he fixed everything. He wants to buy her off, even telling her to “think about him”. Things go bad when she stands up for herself, trying to get home and eventually threatens to tell his wife about him. He hits her and calls her a whore.
She runs from him, and they chase her to the edge of a cliff. Richard tries to convince her to trust him, then pushes her off the edge, impaling her on a tree branch. Thinking she’s dead, they plan to finish their hunting trip and clean up the body, burning any evidence of Jen’s existence. Richard calls his wife and plays the good husband, revealing how truly psychopathic he is, to the point where he denies Jen’s existence at all.
Jen’s Second Life
Except she’s not dead, she’s reborn. This is not the bubbly sexy girl that danced for the men at the beginning of the film. She’s is a woman who burns a tree down to get herself free from it. This is also where I fell in love with Jen and Coralie Fargeat.
As Jen drags herself away from the burning tree, the men show up and are not happy to find her body missing. Richard is leading the charge to hunt her down and finish the job. They follow the trail of blood she is leaving behind. Being impaled causes some injuries—but it leads to a lake. Stan has lost his taste for violence and stays at the lake. There are so many small touches in this scene that show what kind of person Stan is. He’s not a criminal mastermind, just your normal, everyday rapist. And yeah, the fact that “everyday rapist” is a thing bothers the hell out of me.
Jen tries to sneak up on Dimitri and shoot him, but it’s a trap. He tries to drown her, but she gets his hunting knife and stabs his eyes out as he brags about his hunting technique. After she’s sure he’s dead, she recovers the knife. Now she has a knife, his supplies, and his ATV. She also still has a piece of branch still in her.
Into The Cave
Jen finds a cave where she can take inventory and figure out her next steps, first of which is solving the branch problem. She ends up taking some peyote and getting super high to block the pain. She then removes the branch with the knife, and cauterizes the wound with a heated beer can. This leaves a brand of the beer’s logo on her stomach: a bird of prey. Is this on the nose and over the top? Yes. But, I still love it, and the way it was filmed.
The next morning, Richard has finished hunting, but Dimitri has not shown up. As Stan goes to wash his face in the river, Dimitri’s body floats up to surprise him. There are moments of casual cruelty from both Stan and Richard here. Their disrespect for what they are hunting and their overall disregard for life, are in full view. It’s highlighted by Richard complaining about Stan running the air con because it’s “unecological”. Stan follows this up by regretting not his assault, but the attempted murder as the inciting incident. These are men with zero self-awareness.
Jen has a horrific peyote-fueled nightmare; when she wakes, she’s fully committed to her revenge. She’s in a black sports bra and shorts with a rifle and hunting gear. Her blonde hair is stained from blood and soot, but her neon pink, star earrings are still there.
The First Gunfight
Jen tracks down Stan, but has a hard time shooting him. She eventually hits him in the shoulder, but she’s not proficient with a gun. She wounds him badly and now Jen is the one following the blood trail. Stan manages to shoot Jen in the ear before cutting his foot running. He makes it back to the car to try to run Jen down, but she shoots and kills him. With his buddies dead, Richard is alone. We’re treated to beautiful wide shots of him dwarfed by the scenery. He panics as he realizes that his companions have been killed by the woman he tried to murder. Richard races home to clean up and run away, calling for the helicopter.
The Last Gunfight
Jen catches up to Richard while he showers and shoots first, hitting him in the stomach. What follows is one of the bloodiest, two-person shotgun fights I’ve ever seen. As they battle to the death, Richard’s blood covers almost every surface of the sleek home. He spends this scene with a wound in a similar location to Jen’s impaled branch, naked and bleeding. He’s frightened and running, still trying to gain the upper hand. Jen finally puts him down in a hallway so covered in his blood, she slips in it standing up.
I cannot stress how visually impressive the end of the movie is. As she walks out of the shadow of the house she steps into the morning sunlight. It’s a beautiful metaphor for her journey. Covered in blood, she waits at the end of the pool as the sound of the approaching helicopter grows louder.
The Beauty of Revenge
Jen is not a perfect victim. She’s a party girl who’s knowingly sleeping with a married man, and none of that matters in terms of what happens to her. We shouldn’t need flawless women to root for them. Revenge can be seen as a story of character growth and empowerment. Although you could make the argument that despite her appearance and flaws, Jen was always strong to begin with.
When something traumatic happened to her, she stood up for herself, overestimating the humanity and empathy of her lover. She always showed the ability to use the tools in front of her, from sexy clothes, to threats, to high-powered shotguns. One of the scenes that nailed Jen’s strength for me was a quiet moment after she leaves the cave. The camera pans over her body, showing the damage that’s been done to her,. This includsburns on her back from the fire she set at the tree. It’s a powerful visual that reminds us of how much pain she’s been carrying.
Revenge doesn’t just have to be a story of a woman becoming stronger. From a certain perspective, it’s the story of an already tough woman finding out how far she’ll go to survive.
Final Thoughts:
Revenge movies can be a tough genre to get into. Even creators with the best of intentions can wander into the realm of creating art that exploits women’s suffering for entertainment. Revenge avoids this trap, by reframing a familiar journey. It would be insulting to reduce Fargeat’s talent and vision here just to her gender. Ignoring how the female gaze impacts storytelling would also be shortsighted. Revenge examines how we view Jen, showing her through the male gaze, literally, then reframing her. Which impression of Jen is correct? That’s really up to the viewer, isn’t it?
In the end the result is a stylish, violent story with real impact. No matter how you feel about Jen, watching her complete her story is satisfying.
Revenge is currently available on Shudder.
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