Tag: Revenge

Our dirty questions to the Canadian helmers

Posted on by Paul Risker

Actress, writer and director Madeleine Sims-Fewer, and director and writer Dusty Mancinelli, premiered their feature debut, the Canadian independent horror Violation at Midnight Madness, TIFF 2020.

Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer) and her husband Caleb (Obi Abili), visit her younger sister Greta (Anna Maguire) and brother-in-law Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe), at their secluded lakeside home in the Canadian woods. Troubled from a past trauma and on the edge of divorce, the family reunion takes a dark turn for Miriam when a slip in judgement leads to an act of betrayal. Fearing that her sister is in danger she commits an act of violent revenge, but she’s unprepared for the emotional and psychological toll.

The pair first collaborated together on the 2017 short Slap Happy, about a breakup of a sexually expressive couple, and was followed by Woman in Stall (2018) and Chubby (2019), about a ten-year-old confronting the trauma of her sexual abuse.

In conversation with DMovies, Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli discussed not weighing a film down with expectations, but instead allowing it to be whatever it needs to be, and guarding against being typecast by the genre.

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Paul Risker – ‘What we are’ versus ‘who we feel we are’ can often be out of synch. I’ve spoken with directors who say that it took a number of films before they felt they could call themselves a filmmaker. Do you feel that you can call yourselves filmmakers?

Dusty Mancinelli – I was struggling with actualisation as a human being for a long time, and it’s only now that I feel comfortable with myself as a human being. In terms of being a filmmaker, I’ve been making shorts for 13 years, and I definitely had no clue who I was as a filmmaker prior to meeting Madeleine. It was only through our collaboration that I felt I finally understood the kinds of films I wanted to make, and how I wanted to make them.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer – There’s a clarity that comes from our collaboration in realising what our voice is, together and individually. I definitely didn’t know what my voice as a filmmaker was, I was still working it out, and there’s something about the way Dusty challenges me as an artist that actually helped me to realise what it is I want to say.

DM – I don’t believe in anything ever being fully formed. No artist is fully formed, even the greatest artists, and I’m always in awe of PT Anderson for example, who has evolved. His films are very much his films, but you see a progression in his work that’s inspiring.

There’s a danger in thinking you’re fully formed as a human being, or as an artist because then there’s nowhere to go. I don’t believe in the idea of mastering a craft, or yourself as a person – that idea is an illusion. What we’re constantly striving for, like Madeleine said is clarity, but also a sense of growth and progression. It’s almost like you’re in a dark forest that’s absolutely endless, and you’re trying to find some boundary that represents your shape. You don’t know what that is and with every film it’s like we’re trying to figure it out, and hopefully we get closer to it, but also that it shows a range of tastes.

One thing we’re noticing coming off the back of Violation is how many people will see us as these kinds of filmmakers because of the content and the genre. We have such a wide range of tastes that it’s important for us to think carefully about the next thing that we do, and how that still represents who we are, but will also show our diversity.

MSF – There’s a funny thing people in the industry say: “Don’t say I want to be a director, say I am a director”, which is so silly. I don’t subscribe to that at all. It’s almost like this secret way of imagining things into reality, and filmmaking is a lot more tangible than that. I don’t know if I would, other than by putting on my tax form, say I’m a filmmaker. There’s no pride for either of us in saying that.

DM – A lot of that has to do with how we romanticise the idea of filmmaking and writing. The imposter syndrome only comes out of the romanticisation of it because I don’t feel any pleasure in being able to identify myself as a filmmaker, or as a writer.

MSF – It’s more stifling.

DM – It’s not easy, and it constantly feels like you’re going to battle with yourself. It’s part of your identity I guess in a way that feels basic, though I totally respect and appreciate the idea of the imposter syndrome. We’re definitely crippled with insecurities and things that sometimes slow us down, or we get blocked creatively.

PR – Greta and Miriam both convey the characteristics of strength and weakness, but in different ways. Was it your intention to question these as being exclusive of one another?

MSF – This reveals what we’re interested in, which is the complexities of human beings and human relationships, but also that we are multifaceted people. There’s an inherent strength in emotional outpouring, but there’s also an inherent strength in stoicism, and I don’t think those two things have to cancel each other out, when neither one is right.

DM – In revenge films, it’s all about that person finding their redemption or closure. This is an anti-hero, this is someone who it’s not important to us that you like her, but we want you to understand her as much as possible, and it’s the same with Miriam’s brother-in-law. This is drawing from our own personal experiences of abuse and trauma now, but you’re so used to in the sub-genre of rape revenge seeing the stranger in the alleyway who is clearly a nefarious villain. Yes, I’m sure those people exist and that does happen, but it has been reported that more often than not sexual abuse is caused by a perpetrator who is close to the victim, and who’s trusted. It’s a family member, a friend, someone who’s in the inner circle. We realised we had not been seeing that, and what happens when you make that person affable and charming at the beginning? How can you actually make the audience feel betrayed by this character, so that it simulates the betrayal that Miriam feels in the moment?

PR – We infer a previous traumatic incident in Miriam’s past, but by treating it ambiguously do you see this as a way to create space for the audience to enter the film, and for you to manipulate how we identify with characters?

DM – This is something we learned when we made our short film Woman in Stall, about a woman trapped in a public bathroom. There’s a man on the other side and she’s not sure what his intentions are. When we were cutting the movie, we weren’t sure how much to show of him, and if we should make him out to be a complete villain. We realised the best thing we could possibly do was to try to walk as fine a line as possible, without revealing to the audience what our thoughts were about either of these characters. Instead we tried to subvert your expectations of who you thought this person was, trying to show you them both in as much of an unvarnished way as possible.

It was fascinating when we showed it at the Austin Film Festival. We were in the audience and they did a poll to see what the stances were, and it was 50-50. It was amazing to see that half the people thought she over-reacted, and half the people thought he was a creep. We realised it’s magic and what that kind of conversation reveals to us is just how a film can provoke an internal bias, and that’s exciting to us. After that experience we’ve been chasing it, trying to figure out how can we constantly do that, and Violation does it in so many different ways.

MSF – Some people can be frustrated by that because they don’t like any ambiguity in the films that they watch, and that’s fair. This film is not for those people, but it’s something that will always exist in our films.

DM – … There’s no ambiguity in what happens to Miriam, I think that’s important to note. The ambiguity comes in the complexities of this being someone she trusts, someone in the family. Then what happens when your sister also doesn’t accept this truth? What does it mean to find justice, and is there such a thing as the self-righteous notion of this crusader who enacts their own violent course of vengeance? These are the interesting elements that are complex for us.

PR – You’re right to stress that. By not fully revealing herself to us, she leaves us wanting to understand the violence, pain and anxiety she has suffered, that makes her a difficult character to forget.

MSF – I’ve been thinking more and more about the character, where she’s not someone who entirely belongs anywhere. She doesn’t belong with her sister and she doesn’t belong with her husband. She’s constantly seeking this belonging and never finds it, and so many people latch onto that and feel the same way about their own lives. We feel that, and it’s something that has come through in the character.

DM – Trauma can be incredibly alienating, and that’s what it comes down to for us.

PR – Interviewing Larry Fessenden, he spoke of how a film is abandoned. Would you agree with this sentiment, or is it more about being able to let go of the film, and accepting it’ll never be perfect?

DM – One thing I’ve discovered over the years, and I believe this, is that the thing we’re creating is alive. I think of it as a living organism and I don’t know what it’s going to be. I’m a parent and I’m trying to inspire it, shape it, or encourage it, but it can go in so many different directions.

MSF – You have the idea of its potential and if you impose your view of what it should be, then it absolutely will not live up to your expectations – just like no child lives up to their parent’s expectations if they impose these on them. You have to just be open for it to become whatever it needs to be.

DM – We could keep working on it forever, and when you release a film there’s a sense of clarity about what you would do differently. Sure, we could go back in the edit room and spend four more months on it, and we’d change it, or we could go back and rewrite the script. There’s a certain point with any piece of art where you have to accept the final manifestation of that idea, as the inevitability of every action that brought you there, and you have to fully accept that it’s always going to be imperfect.

MSF – One of our actors said that when they watched the film, they didn’t recognise themselves because that was a moment in time that has now gone. It was a great way of putting it because when I now watch the film, I don’t quite recognise that part of myself because I’m now someone different. You’re just constantly moving and evolving, and the next thing we make will be a completely different stage, and then we’ll move on from that.

Violation is streaming exclusively on Shudder.

A Vigilante

Posted on by victorfraga

Olivia Wilde’s Sadie is the kind of character entire film franchises and graphic novels could be written about. Donning fake contact lenses, a large wig and copious amounts of concealer, she helps abused women and children break free of their oppressors through calm and collected violence. Hidden behind this steely and at times terrifying exterior is a woman processing her own deep-set trauma, A Vigilante telling the story of a woman reclaiming her life from her own abusive husband one savage beatdown at a time.

This is a revenge-thriller with elevated concerns, really mining the depths of trauma to propel an uneven narrative about the difficulty of moving on and doing something positive with a life that has hit ground zero. Balancing art-house sadness with moments of genuine terror, it’s a frank, morally grey tale that sees Olivia Wilde turning in one of her best ever performances.

At times the movie threatens to turn into the no-holds-barred b-thriller the title suggests, with Sadie’s abuse the unfortunate spark that sets her on her path to become a vengeful superhero. One scene outside of a bar, seeing Wilde successfully dispatch three lecherous creeps with nothing but her bare hands and some leftover plywood, points to the easy direction A Vigilante could’ve gone in. But director Sarah Daggar-Nickson has something deeper on her mind. These scenes are interspersed with counselling sessions that border on documentary work, allowing women to sit in a circle and bear witness to their horrific abuse. The things that men can do to women are laid out in no uncertain terms, creating moments of genuine, skin-curdling horror.

It’s reminiscent of Lynne Ramsey’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), especially in the way that it takes the domestic revenge drama and repurposes it for its own, more intimate ends. While it may not have the same tightness of control of Ramsey’s electric film, which boasted one of the best performances of Joaquin Phoenix’s career, its loose and open low-budget energy showcases the best of what Olivia Wilde can do.

She is in almost every frame of this film, and she injects the role with infectious, nervous energy, skittering between extraordinary resolve and totally open vulnerability. In one scene she dances in her bedroom to a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, A Vigilante making sure to express her personality first; making her much more than just a victim. After seeing her go-off-the-rails (and not in a a good way) in the disastrous Life Itself (Dan Fogelman, 2018), it’s refreshing to see Wilde back on the right track.

It’s a disappointment then, that the final scenes (mild spoilers) circle around a clichéd MacGuffin involving a large life insurance payout, unwisely suggesting that mere money is enough to allow one to move on from terrifying trauma. Perhaps it makes sense given the nowhere American locale this film occupies, a place of deadbeat bars, truck stops and personality-less offices; yet both Wilde and her character deserve better than this.

After subverting and playing with tropes so effectively, A Vigilante can’t quite stick the landing in a way that feels appropriate to what its character has gone through. Nonetheless, it’s worth watching for Wilde’s performance, a crackerjack box of unguarded emotion that sets the actor back on the right (and righteous) path.

A Vigilante is in cinemas and also on digital HD on Friday, May 31st.

Revenge

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Flown in by private helicopter pilot, Frenchman Richard (Kevin Janssens) takes Jen (Matilda Lutz) to his luxury home in the middle of the desert for a day or so. He is clearly rolling in money, she appears to be in love with him but perhaps she’s play acting: something of the gold-digger in her, maybe. She wears skimpy clothing emphasising sexual aspects of her body. She comes on strong to him. Passion ensures. All of which is a lot less fun to watch than it sounds: the male is little more then a caricature of the sort often found in the less carefully made end of French action and gangster movie production while the girl displays every patriarchal cliché in the book in the way she moves, dresses, acts and interacts.

Director Fargeat has a very different agenda, however. The next morning, Jen is startled by the unexpected appearance of two male gunmen outside the patio window. Richard’s business associates Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) have arrived for the three men’s hunting party a day earlier than expected, shattering the couple’s intended privacy. No matter: all four drink and party into the night and Jen just can’t resist coming on as strong to Stan as she did to Richard the previous day.

The day after that, when Richard is away for a few hours, Stan tries his luck at love, is understandably shocked when Jen rejects his advances then somewhat less understandably rapes her. He even invites Dimitri to join in, but the latter is nursing a hangover and leaves them to it, turning up the TV volume to drown out the woman’s cries. When Richard returns, being an irredeemable male stereotype, he sides with his two pals not his girlfriend.

At this point, the by-the-numbers feminist tract suddenly becomes both inventive and interesting. Ensuing events lead to Jen’s impalement on a small, desert bush. Her self-extrication leaves her with a distinctly phallic, pointed piece of wood through her stomach. She retreats to a womb-like cave and ingests some of the local peyote to remove the wooden projectile, cauterise the wound and emerge as a blackened, scantily clad huntress who will track down each of the three men in turn and exact her revenge. The remainder of the film (which is most of it) does exactly what it says in the title – and with considerable style.

It’s not the woman reborn theme and intentions that are impressive: they arguably get in the way. Fargeat is so determined to put her feminist heroine on screen that, for instance, Jen doesn’t take the shoes off the first man she kills but proceeds to track the others barefoot. The images are more arresting, the proceedings less believable.

However, what Fargeat is clearly very good at is orchestrating the cat and mouse antics of pursuer and pursed, on which level Revenge is absolutely peerless once it eventually gets going. On foot, she tracks down one of the men parked by a waterhole, another as he drives along a trail and finally her former boyfriend back at the luxury home where it all started, now a labyrinth of slippery, bloody corridors. Fargeat has fun with some highly sexualised Freudian imagery too, for instance having a man open up a vagina-like wound in his foot when he steps on a piece of broken glass. Apparently the director admires David Cronenberg.

If you can overlook its tedious, predictable male fantasy first reel, the last two thirds of Revenge deliver an edge of the seat thriller with a compelling, blood-soaked climax. From the moment the male/female power roles reverse, it becomes utterly compelling on a non-rational, visceral level, a French, feminist tract masquerading as a trashy US action thriller. Clench your teeth through the opening reel and you’ll enjoy (if that’s the right word) everything that follows.

Revenge is out in the UK on Friday, May 11th with a preview at PictureHouse Central, London + Q&A with Director Coralie Fargeat and star Matilda Lutz on Friday 4th at 6.30pm. It’s out on VoD on Monday, September 10th.

Watch the official UK film trailer below (but be warned – it contains one serious spoiler: we recommend you watch the whole movie first):