Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge (2017) gives the rape-revenge film an important update by adding a heavy dose of feminist consciousness, as well as a significant upgrade in production values. Indeed, while a rough outline of the plot of the film seems to conform to the conventions of the rape-revenge film fairly well, the film ultimately subverts most of the conventions of the genre in subtle ways. Ultra-violent and spectacularly bloody, Revenge is also extremely (and self-consciously) clever in its play with its cinematic predecessors, delivering a significantly upgraded female protagonist but also questioning or even parodying the attitudes and assumptions upon which the classic form of the genre is based. In so doing, the film helped to open the way for several subsequent interventions in the rape-revenge genre (especially via films by female directors), suggesting a renewal of the genre for a new era, almost half a century after its beginnings in films such as Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978).
The Set-Up: Jen as Object of the Male Gaze
Revenge begins as rich-and-handsome Richard (Kevin Janssens) helicopters to his posh modernist desert villa, accompanied by his nymphet-like mistress, Jen (Matilda Lutz). From the very beginning, it is clear that, visually and stylistically, Revenge has very little in common with its rough-hewn predecessors in the rape-revenge genre, which had made a virtue of low-budget necessity by using their grainy cinematography and amateurish acting to create atmosphere for their scenes of abject violence. From its beautiful opening shot of a panoramic desert landscape, to the views of the gorgeous ultramodern villa, to the presentation of the scenes of bloody violence themselves, Revenge itself is exquisitely shot (by award-winning Belgian cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert), well-acted, and well-crafted in every way. Moreover, the film self-consciously foregrounds its glossy style, thus Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s reference to the “slick, fashion magazine gloss of Fargeat’s film—drenched with seemingly conscious echoes of the French cinéma du look tradition” (Heller-Nicholas 2021, 275). Fargeat’s film, also shows the clear influence of the New French Extremity movement in the extreme gore of its bloody violence but also presents this violence with mor attention to aesthetics than in the typical rape-revenge film.
While viewing that opening panorama, we gradually hear the whirring of helicopter blades, almost like the opening of Apocalypse Now. Then we see, in the far distance, an approaching dot that gradually resolves into a helicopter that flies straight toward and then over the camera, which shoots it from below. A strangely tinted shot of the landscape gives it an almost surreal feel—reinforced by the eerie opening music. Then the camera pulls back a bit to reveal that this new shot is a reflection in the mirrored sunglasses of the man who will turn out to be Richard. Sitting just behind him and to his right, also in sunglasses, is Jen, sucking on a lollipop, which emphasizes her youth. She looks, in fact, very much like Lolita when she is first spotted sunbathing by Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), a shot that was memorialized on the film’s poster[1]. The lollipop, though, is also clearly meant to be suggestive of oral sex, and it is no coincidence that Jen performs fellatio on Richard literally within a minute after he enters the villa, to which they are flying in the helicopter. As it turns out, Jen is a grown, sexually experienced woman, not a little girl.
Fig. 1: Jen appears Lolita-like early in the film.
The next shot, carefully composed from inside the astonishing villa through a glass wall, shows the helicopter landing on the ground outside. Green fields in the background suggest that the setting isn’t quite as arid as it first appeared, while we see enough of the villa to make it clear that this is a luxurious abode of the rich. The view through that glass wall looks almost like a painting. As Jen descends from the copter in her short, sexy skirt and bare midriff top, the camera lingers sensually on her smooth, tanned thighs, already announcing the way in which Jen will be the focus of a textbook case of the male gaze in the opening segments of the film. She gives Richard a flirtatious smile over her shoulder as she heads inside the villa, looking around her with approval, while Richard says farewell outside to the pilot, who slips him some peyote before flying away. Both sex and drugs have already been introduced into the equation, and it appears that Richard and Jen are in for the kind of decadent retreat that only the very wealthy can afford; or, to be more precise, Richard is in for that kind of retreat; Jen is merely another of the luxuries that his wealth allows him to have.
When Richard goes inside the villa, Jen is already waiting in a sensuous pose, half Lolita and half Barbarella. She immediately presents herself to him for sex. He spins her around, lifts up her skirt, and gives us our first good look at her ass—which will in many ways be the star of the film’s first half hour. It is clear that she is playing her expected role, and one might wonder at this point if she is a high-class prostitute. However, he tells her, in French-accented English, that she drives him completely crazy, which makes her seem more like a girlfriend. Without a word, she drops to her knees, unzips his pants, and begins to perform fellatio—before she has even spoken a word in the film. A cut to the very next scene shows Richard, naked, talking that night (in French) on the telephone with his wife. Jen lies alone in the bed that Richard has clearly just left to take his wife’s phone call, looking decidedly unhappy. It’s a classic moment: the cheating husband goes away for a romp with his beautiful young girlfriend, but remains moored to his wife and children, leaving the girlfriend in a precarious situation.
It could be a setup for a romantic comedy, though everything about the film’s first few moments suggests that it will be more serious. When Richard returns to bed, Jen remains turned with her back to him, pouting. He exhales in frustration at the situation. “Everything would be so simple if the kids weren’t there,” he says, suggesting that, were it not for the children, he would leave his wife for Jen in a heartbeat. But then he follows that statement with an addition that perhaps tell us more about his real attitude toward Jen: “And if you didn’t have such a nice ass,” he says.
We might expect her to smack him at this point. Instead, she seems pleased when he starts to fondle the body part in question, and she smiles and giggles when he calls it “my little, juicy, peachy ass,” apparently glad that Richard’s attention has shifted back to her and away from his family. Then, Richard adds a bizarre bit of extra objectification by suggesting that her ass is “like a little alien coming from another planet.” She then turns toward him and they start to kiss. Their faces are encircled on the screen by a disc of light that sets their faces apart from their darker surroundings, then the disc fades into a shot of the full moon. It’s a self-consciously romantic bit of cinemagic—so self-conscious that it seems contrived, suggesting that their relationship might not exactly be one of true love.
Cut to the next day. A shot of a robot vacuum cleaning the villa’s striking pool is followed by a shot of the pool itself, showing that it overlooks tilled fields, with a stunning mountainscape in the distance. It becomes more and more clear just how luxurious this setting really is. The film was, as it turns out, shot in a real villa in Morocco, but the exquisite house, as shot in the film, looks almost too perfect to be real. The effect is to give the film the air of a parable, set in a sort of alternate reality that does not necessarily correspond to any specific place on earth. Indeed, the film carefully avoids any mention of place names, thus enhancing this fairy-tale effect. The impeccably decorated house, with its expensive furnishings and sleek, modern electronics, is like a consumerist paradise, filled with emblems of wealth, almost like hunting trophies (a connection that is reinforced by the fact that additional men will soon arrive, having come there for a hunting trip in the surrounding desert).
Fig. 2: The posh villa where much of the action takes place.
These consumerist resonances also help to emphasize the way in which Richard and the other men who arrive at the villa regard Jen as just another commodity, just another perk of Richard’s obvious wealth. Richard and Jen are, after all, already in their second day at the villa when the other men arrive, and we have yet to hear her speak a word, yet to see her display any real qualities except a self-conscious awareness of just how sexy she is (which is, of course, the only thing that Richard cares about). Jen, in the film’s early scenes, seems extremely comfortable with her body and her sexuality, very much aware of her effect on men and more than willing to participate in her own sexual objectification. Yet she seems very much unaware of the implications of that objectification.
In the next sequence, we see Jen strutting about the villa in a red bikini bottom and pink cutoff T-shirt, imprinted with the slogan “I ❤️ L.A.” The camera virtually fondles her buttocks as she walks jauntily about the villa, still not having spoken. Her first utterance is a gasp as she bites sensuously into an apple, Eve-like, then turns to look outside and is surprised to see an armed man looking at her through the glass wall. Then a second armed man arrives, and Jen calls out for Richard, so that her first utterance in the film involves a cry for help, signaling her feminine vulnerability and weakness. Richard walks in, sees the men, and is clearly exasperated, but not alarmed. The men turn out to be his friends Stan and Dimitri (Vincent Colombe and Guillaume Bouchède), who were supposed to join Richard after Jen had left. Richard introduces the young woman to them, in English: “Jennifer. Just a friend.” Stan and Dimitri exchange glances that suggest they know just what kind of friend she is. Richard introduces Stan and Dimitri as “my associates,” at which Jen smiles at them and says, “Hi.” Her first actual word in the film, more than eight minutes in, is a mere platitude. Then, she finally she in sentences, though still ones with little content: “I’ll leave you guys to it. I’m gonna go take a shower.” As she walks away, the camera clearly assumes the gaze of Dimitri and Stan as they stare at her receding ass, no doubt imagining what she is going to look like in that shower. And she knows it.
Now that Jen has finally spoken, we realize that she speaks essentially unaccented American English, though there might be just a hint of an unidentifiable accent there, and there are other hints in the film that she is not from America, preserving the indistinct geographical indications of the film[2]. For example, she indicates later in the film that her dream is to fly away to Los Angeles, because “everything is possible there. Everything goes faster. And you can be noticed in no time.” It is clear that she wears the T-shirt, not to indicate that she is from L.A., but to indicate that L.A. is her dream locale, and that she hopes to go there to “get noticed,” as so many young women—like Naomi Watts’s[3] young Betty at the beginning of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)—have headed there in the hope of being discovered. That the film is roughly half in English and half in French also reinforces the fable-like quality of the film, joining with the nonspecific nature of the characters’ names to contribute to the sense that this film is not taking place within the reality of any particular national or cultural setting. It should be noted, though, that the three men speak almost exclusively in French among themselves, even in front of Jen, suggesting their lack of regard for the young woman, who appears to understand only English—which all of the men are perfectly capable of speaking.
The nonspecific geography of this film, by the way, is perfectly appropriate and has a thematic function: the film is not set within any particular geographic milieu but is instead set within the world of contemporary consumer capitalism. That world, at this point, is entirely global. Jen’s early objectification can be taken as a comment on age-old patriarchal attitudes toward women. But her portrayal also has a specifically consumerist slant, especially given her surroundings in the luxurious villa, where she becomes just one more element of the expensive décor. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Stan ultimately rapes her. He does not regard her as a person, but as a thing; and, within the ideology of consumerism, things are to be desired and then possessed.
Whether or not Jen means to imply that she hopes to become an actress in L.A., she is clearly presented as something of a performer. And she makes very sure that all three men notice her performance as she flounces about the villa for the next ten minutes or so. It is clear that Jen has no interest in seducing Richard’s friends. In general, though, her performance is overt enough, especially given subsequent events, that it can clearly be taken as a parody of the notion that women who dress and act in certain ways are “asking for it.” The camera does its best to emphasize the effect, lingering on her scantily-clad body as if mimicking the gazes of the men. It should be emphasized that there is nothing in the least bit slutty about the way Jen carries herself during this segment of the film. Jen trusts Richard and is comfortable with him; she is also happy to be on display for his friends, assuming that Richard will be pleased and proud to have his friends see his prize possession. It is clear at this point that, while Jen might be a sexually experienced would-be homewrecker, she is also quite innocent in some ways. She knows men like to look at her, but she does not seem to fully realize what is behind those looks. She will receive a rude awakening soon enough.
The Rape: Objectification Turns Violent
For his part, Richard seems proud to have Jen on display, like a trophy from a hunting trip like the one his friends have to come to the villa to undertake with him. Her role as trophy is further emphasized in one scene in which Dimitri, though sitting ten feet away from Jen beside the villa’s pool, looks at her through his hunting binoculars, so that he can get a close-up view, especially of her lips, but also casting her in the role of one of the animals they are preparing to hunt. Meanwhile, the fact that the men are on a hunting trip at all suggests that they are in a mood to demonstrate their masculine power over weaker creatures. In addition, the fact that American professional wrestling plays on the television while the three men party with Jen suggests the way in which the villa is at this point drenched in testosterone, while the fact that one of the wrestlers is dressed as a gladiator emphasizes that such masculine contests have a long cultural history (as well as the fact that there is something inauthentic about them, given the reputation of professional wrestling).
Jen entertains the men during their party by dancing seductively for them beside the pool, even enticing Stan to dance with her after Richard declines. Stan clearly regards the invitation as a sexual one, though Jen just as clearly sees it as innocent fun. He stands there, grinning, while she undulates around him like he’s a stripper pole. She likes that men notice her and has no idea how thoroughly these three men, at least, are objectifying her, partly because she trusts Richard to respect her. The song (played on the villa’s deluxe sound system) to which she and (ultimately) Stan dance is a high energy mix of hip hop and electronic dance music called “Dance Like Machines,” by the French DJ Brodinski. This song has the kind of high energy for which French DJs have become famous in recent years, though it also has an international flavor. Vocals are supplied by Dutch rapper Faberyayo, who sounds very American, while the music itself would be equally at home in clubs in Paris, London, Amsterdam, New York, or West Amman. In addition, the music has a very manufactured quality, which fits in nicely with the exploration of consumerism in the film. Finally, the music is designed simply to be danced to, its minimal lyrics (including lines such as “Cyborgs and androids dance like machines”) being very much beside the point—though one line (“shit’s about to go down”) does seem prophetic given what is about to happen in the film[4].
Fig. 3: The camera lingers on Jen’s body early in the film.
Finally, Stan starts to dance as well, while Jen rubs against him, which finally causes Richard to intervene. He grabs Jen and throws her over his shoulder, carrying her off to their bedroom, caveman-style, as the film cuts back to the professional wrestling on the television. It’s a clear declaration of ownership on the part of Richard, and it clearly makes Stan envious. The next morning, Jen wakes up alone and finds that Richard has gone away to present Stan’s and Dimitri’s passports to the gamekeeper, while a close-up of the apple bitten into by Jen earlier, shows the exposed flesh turning brown, while an ant crawls onto it, suggesting (maybe a bit too symbolically) that all is not right in this seemingly Edenic world.
As Jen is dressing, Stan walks in and gets a look at her entirely naked. She handles it gracefully, but she is clearly embarrassed. Stan, clueless, does not seem to realize that he has crossed a line. He sits on the bed beside her and starts creepily hitting on her, even giving her his business card so that she can perhaps call him some time so they can “do a thing or two” together. As she tries to fend him off, he gets more and more aggressive and insulting. He very crudely suggests that she had been “dying for it” the day before, “coming on to be like a pussy in heat.” When he starts to rape her, she is so stunned and terrified that she hardly resists. Nothing has prepared her for this moment, and Fargeat has carefully crafted the scene to ensure that any non-pathological viewer will strongly sympathize with Jen and be revolted by the disgusting Stan. The decidedly non-erotic nature of the rape sequence also emphasizes that the rape is a matter, not of succumbing to desire for sex, but of succumbing to the desire to exert masculine power over a woman. There is no question at all of her having “asked for it,” despite her behavior the night before. She screams as Stan rapes her; Dimitri turns on the television (now a car race, another masculine image, is on the screen) to drown out her screams so he can relax in the pool in peace. But even the rape scene is artfully shot: from outside the villa, we see Jen’s anguished face pressed against the window, which reflects the beautiful landscape—and Dimitri diving into the gorgeous pool. The contrast between the beauty of the exterior scene and the horror of the interior makes the shot all the more powerful. Meanwhile, the actual rape last less than one minute of run time and takes place mostly off screen—as opposed to the brutally graphic and protracted gang rape scene for which I Spit on Your Grave became so notorious.
Jen, while she has contributed to her own commodification, has clearly not realized how thoroughly this phenomenon has led the men to dehumanize her. The film makes it clear that she has a right to act however she wants without being raped for it. When Stan rapes her, she is shocked and humiliated, but she still assumes that Richard will avenge her when he returns. It is only when he appears merely to be mildly annoyed with Stan for raping her that she begins to understand the truly low regard in which the men, including Richard, hold her. When Richard tries to buy her off to keep her quiet about the attack, transferring cash into an account for her and offering to set her up with a job in Canada (which, he points out, is “practically in Los Angeles”), she begins further to awaken to the true situation. Shockingly, he urges her not to be selfish: “Think about me,” he callously tells her. He clearly believes that she, like any commodity, can be bought for his convenience. But it is only when she refuses his offer and threatens to tell his wife everything that he shows the full extent of his lack of regard for her. He slaps her, knocking her to the floor, then calls her a “little whore,” which is, of course, pretty much how he has thought of her all along.
The shocking nature of the film then continues to build as Jen tries to run away but is chased down by Richard and pushed off a high cliff. She lands, impaled on an upward pointing tree branch that passes completely through her midsection, thus symbolically re-enacting her rape (but now emphasizing violence). As she lies there, skewered, there seems no chance that she will survive. Richard, appearing more and more despicable, returns to the villa and burns Jen’s things to destroy all evidence of her having been there. Then he calmly calls his wife “just to hear her voice.” When Stan tries to apologize about Jen, Richard says he never heard of her.
The Revenge: Jen as Formidable Action Hero
Heller-Nicholas singles out Revenge as an illustration of the fact that the rape-revenge film is always about fantasy, noting that such films generally tend to involve “a fantasy about getting even, and, more importantly, a fantasy about finding justice when there are no other options available” (Heller-Nicholas 2021, 275). After the seeming murder of Jen, Revenge takes a literal turn toward fantasy, departing from the limitations of verisimilitude altogether, moving toward the supernatural. Jen virtually rises from the dead in a sort mythic rebirth, and Jen has moved into the realm of the superhuman, or at least into the typically masculine realm of the action hero. Later, when she removes the tree branch that is still protruding from her abdomen like a grotesque penis, the moment serves as a sort of symbolic castration of the men.
Jen then proceeds to hunt down the men one-by-one, beginning with Dimitri, whom she dispatches in high slasher fashion with a swift stab of a hunting knife into his right eye socket. This scene anticipates the graphic violence with which the men will be killed, standing in stark contrast to the subtle handling of the rape. Meanwhile, during the revenge sequence Jen remains scantily clad, but her body no longer serves as fodder for the male gaze, while the film is clearly now shot from her point of view. Scarred, burned, and bloodied, her body is now a formidable killing machine, and the camera now emphasizes its power, rather than its sexuality. She still wears the large, pink, dangling, star-shaped earrings that had earlier served to highlight her youthful sexuality, but that now serve as an ironic reminder that those days are behind her, the change being further emphasized when Stan shoots off part of her right ear, taking the earring with it.
We already realize that Stan is a coward and an idiot, so it certainly comes as no surprise that she vanquishes him easily, though Fargeat does present us with some surprising set pieces along the way, beginning with a moment when Richard appears to blow Jen’s head off with a shotgun, followed by an entire sequence of other nightmarish images, only to have her awake from an actual nightmare. Also notable is the prolonged (and preposterously gory) scene in which Stan pulls a shard of glass out of his foot (put there via a booby trap set by Jen), which is both stomach-turning and oddly comic in its excess. It’s only one of several wounds Stan suffers, blubbering and crying the whole time, before Jen finally blows out his brains with Dimitri’s rifle.
All of the action in the desert is gorgeously photographed, yet we also know that the desert is a dangerous place, much like the Terrible Place described by Clover as a typical site of slasher killings. “The desert is sublime, but merciless with the careless,” Richard says at one point. Interestingly, though, the final showdown between Jen and Richard occurs not in the desert, but back in that pristine villa, surrounded by the trappings of consumerism. This, too, we realize, is a Terrible Place. Richard returns to the villa, washes his face in the beautiful pool, then goes inside and plops down, still filthy, on the fancy couch, placing himself, ironically enough, just below a painting of the Virgin Mary that hangs on the wall[5]. He calls his helicopter pilot and orders a pickup, then goes to take a shower, preparing to return to civilization. Jen’s reappearance ruins his plans, leading to a lengthy (and incredibly bloody) battle as they move about the villa, fighting to the death and leaving the exquisite abode smeared with what looks like impossible amounts of Richard’s blood. As if it weren’t already clear that consumerism provides a crucial context for the events of the film, throughout the last battle, a U.S. shopping channel plays on the villa’s television during this sequence. Their frequently repeated motto—“Shop Club USA, where deals are simply irresistible”—describes the attractions of their offerings in clearly sexual terms, capping off the links between consumerism and sexuality that have run throughout the film.
Jen’s first shot of this sequence wounds the naked Richard (who has just stepped out of the shower) and sends his blood flying across the couch and onto the painting of the Virgin Mary, who now looks like blood is oozing from her mouth, cleverly (but possibly blasphemously) quoting the long legacy of Virgin Mary statues and paintings that have been rumored to weep blood or other liquids. This moment can also be taken as a slap at the patriarchal legacy of Catholicism and all it has contributed to what Jen has endured in this film. There’s also a moment verging on humor when Richard wraps his wounded abdomen in plastic wrap from the kitchen to staunch the bleeding, but in general these last few moments are extremely tense as the two combatants slip and slide through the labyrinthine villa, now lubricated with Richard’s blood. Richard finally gets the upper hand and seems on the verge of killing Jen, but first he has to stop to give her a lecture on what a pain in the ass women are, which gives her a chance to turn the tables and blast him with Dimitri’s rifle. In the end, he lies dead, his bare ass exposed in an obscene reversal of all those ass-shots of Jen in the first part of the film. For her own part, Jen, bloody but victorious, walks slowly out of the villa as the helicopter arrives, presumably to take her back to safety. As the film ends, she looks directly into the camera, reversing the male gaze one last time.
Fig. 4: By the end of the film, the gaze is controlled by Jen, not directed at her.
Updating the Rape-Revenge Film
Most negative reviews of Revenge seemed to misperceive it as just another version of films such as The Last House on the Left or I Spit on Your Grave. Hannah Woodhead, for example, “rather than breathing life into a stagnant subgenre, Revenge disappointingly offers more of the same” (Woodhead 2018). Most critics, though, recognized that Revenge was something new. For Manuela Lazic, the film insists that “Jen isn’t a doll, all beautiful surface and flexible limbs, but a real, live person susceptible to pain.” Indeed, Lazic sees Revenge as “the revenge movie to end all revenge movies” (Lazic 2018). Similarly, Max Weinstein highly praises the film, which he sees as a triumph, marked by a number of brilliant touches:
Apart from Revenge‘s intriguing gender and sexual politics, what shines through are Fargeat’s clear feel for the heft and weight of expertly crafted action sequences, absurdist sense of timing that steers the horrific into the realm of the comedic, and discerning visual design that makes star attractions of neon-tinted wardrobe accessories, dust-blown cat-and-mouse chases, and an all-white living room that, when soaked in gallons of blood, turns into a sanguinary Slip ‘N Slide. (Weinstein 2018)
Aline Dolinh was also effusive in her praise for the film, which she sees as being all the more powerful for the way it carefully remains within the boundaries of the rape-revenge movie, at the same time subtly subverting it. For her, the film “provides a stunning validation of female rage and retribution in a way that our culture rarely does” (Dolinh 2018). That Jen exacts her revenge in a way typically reserved for male film characters would seem to validate Dolinh’s claim.
Reading Revenge directly against earlier rape-revenge films shows just what a remarkable departure it is, moving beyond the exploitative nature of the 1970s films, including their sometimes lurid focus on the rapes themselves. Notable films in or adjacent to this subgenre—such as Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999) and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002)—have enriched it along the way, and remakes of The Last House on the Left (2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (2010) have provided only slight updates. However, it was not until the appearance of such female-directed films as Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016), Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. (2017), and Revenge that the subgenre as a whole began to move in genuinely new directions.
These directions become clear when Revenge is compared with a classic rape-revenge film such as The Last House on the Left, whichis quite typical of the genre in the way it employs an avowedly crude grindhouse aesthetic through which its exploitative narrative is presented as a spectacle of violence. Granted, there are elements within the film that might respond to serious analysis, such as the way its rape victims are clearly coded as aligned with the counterculture, attacked by a criminal gang that seems to have emerged from the dark side of the 1950s, much in the way Fredric Jameson has seen characters in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986) as coded by decade, with the character Ray Sinclair (Ray Liotta) emerging as a 1950s villain who threatens the free-spirited Lulu/Audrey (Melanie Griffith), a product of the 1980s via the counterculture of the 1960s. According to Jameson, though, Ray “is not staged demonically, as a representation of evil as such, but rather as the representation of someone playing at being evil,” which tells us a great deal about the postmodern nature of the film (Jameson 1991, 290). One might say the same thing about the criminal gang that rapes and murders the “1960s” girls in Last House, suggesting that the rape-revenge genre can potentially be used for serious cultural commentary. Indeed, multiple critics have read the film as a sort of allegory of the death of 1960s idealism[6]. On the other hand, Craven seems to have no interest in constructing a telling historical allegory of the kind Jameson finds in Something Wild. Last House, in fact, goes out of its way to remind us that none of its motifs are to be taken seriously, even going so far as to make its criminal gang rather bumbling and comical. This aspect of the film can seem jarringly inappropriate to viewers in the 2020s (though it does potentially make the sudden violence of the actual rapes seem more shocking). Moreover, the film even adds a more purely comic motif in its representation of the local sheriff and deputy who seem at first to offer a possible counter to the criminals until it becomes clear that they are too clownishly incompetent to be of any use at all. That these figures of authority are specifically opposed to the counterculture of the 1960s (as when a carload of hippies jeeringly calls them “pigs” and then drives off when the cops try to bum a ride) also offers potential political readings. Again, though, the representation of the cops is all in “fun,” as is emphasized by the comic soundtrack that plays whenever they are on screen. In contrast, Revenge can be quite clever with its use of visuals and music, but it never suggests that there is something comical about the action.
The villains of Revenge are not a criminal gang but a group of seemingly regular guys, with all that this motif implies, just as Jen is much more of an ordinary adult woman than the inexperienced girl victims of Last House—who are simply victims and extract no revenge on their own. In her 2021 update to her book-length study of the rape-revenge film, Heller-Nicholas thus notes that Revenge has been seen as a rape-revenge film for the #MeToo generation, even though it was released before that movement was fully underway (Heller-Nicholas 2021, 275). But Revenge, as Heller-Nicholas also notes,did seem to mark the beginning of a global wave of rape-revenge films (mostly directed by women) that have updated and re-invigorated the genre, adding a number of new elements, such as supernatural horror—as in Anvita Dutt’s Indian rape-revenge film Bulbbul (2020)—or other forms of social commentary—as in the crucial role of aging in Lim Sun-Ae’s Korean rape-revenge film An Old Lady (2020). The latter might also be said for the plight of migrants at the U.S. Southern border in Gigi Saul Gerrero’s Culture Shock (2019), which also adds an important virtual reality motif of a kind that would subsequently be central to Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling (2022), another out-of-the-ordinary rape-revenge film. Meanwhile, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020) has expanded the rape-revenge genre into the social media era. By adding an emphasis on aesthetics and the development of a strong action-hero-like female protagonist, Revenge can be seen as an important forerunner of all of these films.
The appearance of all of these films in such short order is obviously no coincidence, building as it does on the #MeToo movement and other aspects of fourth-wave feminism. But these films, with the high-gloss aesthetics and the impressive action-hero protagonist of Revenge leading the way, have also reinvigorated the rape-revenge genre as a whole, thus driving the appearance of more and more such films, which have now established their ability to serve as vehicles for serious feminist commentary. That these films have branched out in such creative directions suggests that more and more are still to come, promising to make Revenge increasingly significant in the history of films with female heroes as time goes on.
REFERENCES
Brashinsky, Michael. 1998. “The Spring, Defiled: Ingmar Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left.” In Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal. Berkeley: California University Press, pp. 162–71.
Denny, Alex. 2018 “Revenge Is the French, Feminist Kill Bill-style Thriller You Need to See.” Dazed, 11 May 2018, https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/39999/1/revenge-film-coralie-forgeat-interview. Accessed July 30, 2023.
Dolinh, Aline. 2018. “Finding Feminist Catharsis in the Rape-Revenge Film.” Film School Rejects (May 25, 2018). https://filmschoolrejects.com/finding-feminist-catharsis-in-the-rape-revenge-film/. Accessed July 22, 2023.
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2021. Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study. Second edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lazic, Manuela. 2018. “Revenge Is the Revenge Movie to End All Revenge Movies.” The Ringer (May 31, 2018). https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/5/31/17411766/revenge-coralie-fargeat-review. Accessed July 21, 2023.
Lowenstein, Adam. 2005. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press.
Slotek, Jim. 2018. “Revenge: A French Feminist Grindhouse Movie, Fuelled by Peyote.” Original Cin (May 8, 2018). https://www.original-cin.ca/posts/2018/5/9/revenge-a-feminist-french-grindhouse-movie-fuelled-by-peyote. Accessed July 21, 2023.
Weinstein, Max. 2018. “Desert Eagle: How Coralie Fargeat Shot Revenge in the Moroccan Desert, Preserved Her Creative Freedom, and More.” MovieMaker (May 15, 2018). https://www.moviemaker.com/desert-eagle-how-coralie-fargeat-shot-revenge-in-the-moroccan-desert-preserved-her-creative-freedom-and-more/. Accessed July 21, 2023.
Woodhead, Hannah. n.d. “Revenge.” Little White Lies. https://lwlies.com/reviews/revenge/. Accessed July 21, 2023.
NOTES
[1] Fargeat has stated in an interview that Revenge is “about the transformation of the character of this girl who’d been a totally Lolita-ish, Barbie-girl (character) who is very at ease with her body, her sensuality, and that is gonna be seen by those guys as weak” (Pugh 2018).
[2] Some reviewers interpreted Jen as being an American, though I think that is inaccurate. For example, Jim Slotek, who (wrongly, I think) calls Revenge a “French feminist grindhouse movie,” sees her as an American “and a stereotypical American at that.” However, I think she is stereotypically American because she acts out American characteristics learned from popular culture (and perhaps wants to be an American, not because she is literally American.
[3] Ironically, Lutz in this film was just coming off a starring role in the lackluster horror film Rings (2017), the second sequel to The Ring (2002), which had starred Watts (who was just coming off her career-making performance in Mulholland Drive). Rings, incidentally, is a supernatural rape-revenge film, though the character played by Lutz is involved in neither the rape nor the revenge.
[4] The official music video for the song (found at https://youtu.be/ZHcT33gb9bY) is built around scantily-clad female dancers undulating on an actual stripper pole, which gives some idea of the resonance of the music.
[5] The painting is a version of the 1859 work The Virgin with the Crown, by French Neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, though the colors appear to have been altered, making it a sort of postmodern pastiche that commodifies the Virgin Mary.
[6] See, for example, Brashinsky (1998, 169). See also Lowenstein for an extended discussion of the film as a reflection of the impact of the experience of Vietnam on American society (2005, 110–44).