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IIn real life, most of us don’t get that many opportunities to get revenge on someone. A passive-aggressive comeback maybe, but it’s not quite the same. In the movies, however, as in Greek mythology, revenge is one of the driving forces of storytelling: revenge movies, both aggressively gory and more benign, provide cathartic wish fulfillment for our own petty grievances and unsettled scores. In Dev Patel’s steamy directorial debut Ape-manthe mission is familiar – as his street hero seeks retribution for his mother’s murder – but the sheer pleasure of his revenge is exhilarating, right down to driving a dagger through a baddie’s throat with his teeth.
The modern revenge film is largely characterized by such kinetic action and extreme violence, best exemplified by the John Wick franchise (direct name checked in Ape-man), which produced a positively balletic frenzy of gore over 10 years and four films, all for the most humble and endearing cause: a dead dog. Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, played his part in creating this template: revenge missions repeated in a filmography built on the tropes of sleazy exploitation cinema polished to a shine. Django Unchainedwestern, following a freed slave on the warpath, aspires to some social significance, though I prefer the intuitive simplicity of his magnificent Kill Bill movies whose very title lays out the single-minded purpose for Uma Thurman’s fierce, sword-wielding bride—even if a lot of other people get killed along the way, most inventively.
Kill Bill pays homage to, among others, the 1978 horror film I spit on your grave – a one-off nasty video that has become a defining title of the rape-and-revenge subgenre, though it’s not exactly an endorsement of the film itself, which perhaps revels in violence against women more than it protests against it. It’s a far cry from the complex nuances of Paul Verhoeven’s superb work El, in which rape survivor Isabelle Huppert walks a fine line between revenge and perverse desire as she identifies her attacker. Emerald Fennell’s candy provocation A promising young woman, meanwhile, split opinion on the self-sacrificing long game played by Carey Mulligan’s protagonist to avenge her best friend’s sexual assault — empowering or darkly defeatist? As for Sissy Spacek’s eponymous character in Carrieher body responding to a need for revenge against her high school bullies and a maniacally abusive mother with telekinetic powers she can’t fully control, though they certainly get the job done.
Decades later, Spacek engaged in a much more mundane act of revenge In the bedroom, Todd Field’s devastating study of middle-aged parents haunted by the presence of their son’s killer in their local community. It proves that ordinary, mild-mannered people can be driven to violence if legal systems fail them. Michelle Franco’s ditto is bright, shocking After Luciain which a protective father takes drastic measures to punish his teenage daughter’s high school tormentors—without the macho, A death wish-style vigilante justice here, just brutal desperation. In the ranks of arthouse revenge films, it would pair well with Ingmar Bergman’s powerful, gritty film Virgin spring (Internet Archive), based on Max von Sydow’s daring performance as a father who sets out to execute his daughter’s rapists and murderers in medieval Sweden, a mission that takes on a strange kind of spiritual purity.
In Park Chan-wook Old boy – the maddening zenith of the director’s revenge trilogy – a man framed for his wife’s murder and imprisoned by unknown captors for 15 years is finally set free, though his revenge is complicated by his isolation-induced insanity . But a crazed avenger can be just as effective as a cold-blooded one: check out Douglas Hickox’s awesome horror comedy Theater of bloodin which Vincent Price’s humiliated Shakespearean actor concocts a series of elaborate theatrical failures for the critics who panned him: perhaps the most delightfully trivial revenge campaign in all of cinema.
Meanwhile, other revenge comedies manage to get by without the bloodshed. in Nine to five, three beleaguered secretaries initially dream of killing their nightmarish boss before finding a more constructive way to put him out of business; may also share slogan with The First Wives Clubwhose exasperated divorcees are being counseled by none other than Ivana Trump not to be angry, but to get everything.
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The new boy
(Signature)
Indigenous Australian director Warwick Thornton returns with an enigmatic, exquisitely shot fable of clashing religions, pitting a supernaturally gifted Aboriginal boy against a village nun – played by Cate Blanchett – who wants to convert him.
Wicked lower case letters
(StudioCanal)
Regardless of the profane content of said letters, this is more of a tame, soft-centered comedy: a battle of wits and wills between Olivia Colman’s spunky old maid and Jesse Buckley’s boisterous Irish outsider in a 1920s seaside village. The star performances lift it, but they struggle.
The Iron Claw
(Lionsgate)
A true American tragedy so hard it’s hard to believe, Sean Durkin’s solemn, beautiful film follows the downfall of the Von Erich family, a line of professional wrestlers seemingly cursed by repeated injuries and untimely death. Zac Efron gives a good, vulnerable performance as the son trying to break the cycle.
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