Revenge review: Humour with a cunning feminist agenda

Jen (Matilda Lutz) is an aspiring American actress who arrives at a remote house to have some fun with married French lover Richard (Kevin Janssens).

She is supposed to leave before his friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) arrive for a hunting trip. But they turn up a day early and are transfixed by the sight of the exotic American.

French debut writer-director Coralie Fargeat uses her camera to put us in the position of the leering Frenchmen, a viewpoint that becomes deeply troubling when Jen is raped by Stan.

While Dimitri turns up the music to drown out her screams, Richard’s first instinct is to hide the crime from his wife. Jen is left for dead in the desert while the men embark on their trip.

The plot is formulaic and the characters are little more than archetypes. The men represent the rapist, the enabler and the serial abuser while the woman is the avenging angel. But the way Fargeat plays with these tropes gives her film an edge.