How Revenge subverts the rape-revenge thriller

“Why do women always have to fight back,” grunts Richard (Kevin Janssens) as he holds his (ex-)mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz) up by the throat at the end of Coralie Fargeat’s debut film Revenge. A self-aware “rape-revenge” horror, Revenge isn’t only about Jen fighting back, but it’s also Fargeat fighting back against a genre that’s historically exploited sexual violence.

Before the blood starts pouring, our heroine, the unbelievably sexy Jen, is taken on a romantic getaway by her married boyfriend Richard to his remote holiday home. She’s young and beautiful and knows it, playing the role of the fantasy young mistress. As she takes a bite out of an apple, she turns and spots two men with guns staring at her through the glass. They’re Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède), Richard’s hunter pals who have shown up a day early. The apple is forgotten and left to rot on the kitchen counter as the four drink the night away and Jen is ogled by the men.

The next day, while Richard is away, Stan takes Jen’s dancing the night before as her consent. He spies on her while she's dressing, before coming on to her. When she gently rebuff him – “you’re just not my type” – he’s enraged, and proceeds to rape her. Dimitri enters the room, sees what’s happening, and nonchalantly shuts the door before turning the TV volume up to drown out Jen’s screams. Richard returns and attempts to keep her quiet with hush-money. When Jen refuses to go along, the men decide that a dead girl is easier than one who fights back.

Revenge is working in what’s known as the rape-revenge genre, which was conceived in the 1970s at the peak of gory slasher horrors and second-wave feminism. The genre has a simple formula: in the first act, the protagonist – usually an attractive, white young woman – is attacked in a remote location, raped, and left for dead. In the second act, she is miraculously still alive and is “reborn” as an avenging angel of death who decides to seek revenge on her attackers. The dynamics then change as the hunters become the hunted and the woman picks off the men in grisly fashion.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) is often cited as the epitome of the genre. In Meir Zarchi’s film, Jennifer (Camille Keaton) heads to an isolated cabin in upstate New York to finish writing her first novel where she’s spotted by a group of men who decide to attack her. Jennifer is raped in graphic, protracted detail while Zarchi’s camera focuses on the men and their pleasure. She’s beaten, violated, and humiliated. In addition to attacking her physically, the men mock her writing.

When they decide to kill her, one of the men can’t bring himself to land the final blow so he leaves her bleeding out, to die. Jennifer survives and over the next two weeks, we see her traumatised and unable to piece her life back together. Unable to look in mirrors at her maimed body and unable to continue with her writing, she decides the only way to fix what the men have broken is to seek revenge. Over the course of the film, Jennifer seduces each of the men before murdering them in gruesome ways.

The “original” rape-revenge films, which also include The Last House on the Left (1972) and Ms. 45 (1981), are exploitation films. They exploit narratives of sexual assault by showing the protagonists’ attacks in excruciating detail before dressing themselves up as empowering revenge films for women. It’s a cheap, nasty trick that allows generally male directors to show gratuitous sexual violence and then take the moral high ground. This is where Fargeat’s Revenge differs from its genre predecessors.

At the start of the film, Jen’s body is lingered over by the camera: she sucks suggestively on a lollipop, Lolita style, while Fargeat’s camera gives the viewer an upskirt shot. She walks around the house in bikinis and her body is offered up to the audience and the male characters to stare at. It’s a self-aware move by Fargeat to place the audience and the men in the same position as voyeurs gazing without shame. As we stare, Jen performs for us and it’s a perfect example of how the male gaze operates in film. As John Berger wrote, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Revenge’s opening places the film firmly in the rape-revenge genre: a beautiful woman who the men simply can’t resist.

It’s during the rape scene that Fargeat twists the narrative. While I Spit on Your Grave focuses on the men’s pleasure when Jennifer is assaulted, Fargeat chooses not to show the rape. For all its heightened and cartoonish violence, the assault is the film’s most realistic scene; horrifying because it’s all too familiar. When Richard decides to get rid of her by pushing her off the cliff, Jen is impaled by a tree, surely dead. Instead she’s reborn as an avenging angel. Her hair is darker and while she’s still in her underwear, her body is no longer filmed as eye-candy but is athletic and strong.

While Revenge is working within the rape-revenge genre, its name isn’t quite accurate. The film is more rape-survival than revenge, because when the men realise Jen’s still alive, they decide to finish the job. In a twist, Jen proves herself more than capable and begins taking out the men one by one.

Revenge has been controversial with critics. Some are hailing it as a timely feminist weapon while others say it’s recycling the same exploitative tropes of its predecessors. At the centre of this latter argument is the question: if Fargeat wasn’t a woman and instead Revenge was made by a man, would it still be subversive? Are we projecting a feminist reading on to it because it’s made by a female filmmaker? While Revenge might not be nuanced in its message, it’s undoubtedly feminist in that it’s levelling the playing field for its male and female characters.

In its last scene, it’s a man who emerges out of a shower, naked and vulnerable, while a woman is dressed and armed – a subversion of horror’s gendered expectations. What was the last horror film you saw where a naked man is covered in his own blood or a woman slips in blood that’s not her own? By swapping genders, Fargeat switches power dynamics and likewise as a female filmmaker she switches the power dynamics of the male-dominated rape-revenge genre, exposing it as a product of the male gaze.

In its first act, Revenge is a male fantasy, but by its third it’s a female one. In a society entrenched on every level with rape culture – from #MeToo to Trump’s election to the Ulster Rugby rape trial verdict – we’ve seen time and time again, women coming forward with stories of sexual violence and not being listened to. Fargeat’s film isn’t trying to be a nuanced or delicate exploration of these issues; instead it’s operating within the exploitative genre to expose it.

Revenge is about two revenges: Jen’s on the men who have used and abused her, and Fargeat’s on the male-dominated genre that has used and abused depictions of sexual violence. What makes Revenge a horror is the idea that a woman fighting back and getting revenge on her assailants is pure cartoonish, unbelievable fantasy.

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Revenge is released by Vertigo and is in cinemas now