Revenge review: More a cartoon than a real piece of drama

Dir Coralie Fargeat, 108 mins, starring: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe, Guillaume Booted

Blood spills by the gallon in writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s highly stylised and very silly thriller.

The beautiful young Jen (Matilda Lutz) is on a secret desert holiday with her married boyfriend Richard (Kevin Jannsens) in a luxurious hideaway retreat. They have sex, eat lollipops, and Richard takes occasional calls from his unsuspecting wife in which he advises her on the menu for the next dinner party.

We don’t know much about Jen other than that she is young and voluptuous, wears red star earrings, cut-off T-shirts, skimpy bikini bottoms and looks a bit like Sue Lyons in Lolita. We learn she has vague plans to go to LA, presumably to be an actress.

Fargeat shoots the film as if it is one of those very lavish lager or denim commercials that spoof spaghetti westerns. Closeups of a rotting, half-eaten apple hint that not all is well in this particular paradise.

When Richard’s two thuggish business colleagues and hunting partners turn up out of nowhere, the mood changes. Jen rejects the advances of one of them. (“You’re too small – I like taller guys, that’s all.”) That’s the cue for a grim rape scene and for the violence to begin in earnest.

Fargeat doesn’t hold back on the gruesome details. If someone is thrown off a cliff, they’re bound to end up skewered through their guts and left dangling like a prawn on a stick on a branch of a tree below.

Jen may be traumatised, badly injured, and alone in the “merciless” desert but she has far more resilience than the grubby, chauvinist men who want her dead. “Women always have to put up a fight,” one of them complains. She is both their prey and their nemesis. She has eaten the peyote worm which numbs the pain and makes her hallucinate.

The agonies multiply. We see ear lobes being shot off, characters stepping bare-footed on shards of glass or being shot, pummelled or stabbed.

Director Fargeat shows an enjoyably macabre sense of humour. At the most extreme moments, The Shopping Channel will generally be blaring away on a giant screen TV in the background.

She takes a sadistic relish in showing her protagonists trying to run away from one another down marble corridors so awash with blood that they can’t help slipping, like characters trying and failing to stay upright in an old slapstick comedy. The director throws in huge closeups of ants, ready to devour the humans.

There is something ritualistic about the plotting. Jen confronts the men one by one in highly stylised set-pieces.

Jen has been dubbed the “first movie heroine of the ‘Time’s Up’ era” and she certainly wants to make the men pay for their abusive behaviour towards her. It would be stretching it, though, to regard Revenge as a feminist allegory in which all the Harvey Weinstein-types all get their symbolic comeuppance.

The director seems more interested in spectacle than in sexual politics. She wants to spill as much of the ketchup as possible and to startle us as she does so with a level of violence that might have made even Sam Peckinpah quake. Revenge is slick and stylish but also very shallow. It’s more a cartoon than a real piece of drama.

Revenge is out 11 May.