10 Awesome Horror Movies You Probably Missed In 2018
2. Revenge
Maybe part of the reason first-time French director Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge flew under the radar was that some moviegoers deemed the release of a rape-revenge movie in the wake of the #MeToo movement a tad tasteless.
But this is a rape-revenge film with a difference. As one of the few directed by a female filmmaker it offers a fiercely feminist twist that subverts the norms of the subgenre by spitting out some uncomfortable truths about how we view rape victims before morphing into a gloriously violent grindhouse affair that’s both surreal and hyper-stylised.
Matilda Lutz plays American socialite Jen whose weekend away with married boyfriend Richard at his fancy but remote pad in the desert is disturbed by the early arrival of two of his friends for a hunting trip. After Jen is raped by one of the friends her duplicitous beau tries to downplay it and buy her silence before shoving her off a cliff and leaving her for dead.
She isn’t dead, however, and soon the hunters become the hunted as Jen exacts bloody revenge on the lot of them. A bloodbath in the vein of fellow female-focused New French Extremity offerings like Haute Tension and Inside, Revenge is an assured debut that places the emphasis firmly on the revenge rather than the rape.