(Content Warning: This film begins with a sexual assault, and sexual assault is discussed in multiple sections below.)
This movie was on our "to watch" list for a long time, I wish we'd watched it earlier! I'm always hesitant to watch flicks in the rape-revenge category, but honestly, this movie was a breath of fresh air.
Plot unfolds something like this: The night before his annual desert hunting retreat, Richard, his two friends, and his mistress (Jen) take part in a night of partying and drug fueled debauchery. The next morning, Richard leaves Jen with his two friends while he runs into town. Nothing good comes from this. One of the fiends* decides he's entitled to Jen's body, so he rapes her. The other friend walks in on his buddy just in time to save Jen, but opts to ignore her peril and go for a swim instead. Richard returns from town and upon discovering what's transpired, decides Jen has become a liability. Jen is now trapped in the middle of the desert with three men she thought she was safe with; but let's not forget the title of this little movie... [*"Fiend" was a typo, but it feels like it was meant to be.]
Not your usual rape-revenge film: Men tend to shoot rape scenes as though they are sex scenes, use sexual violence as shorthand for inexcusable evil, and tend use sexual brutalization of female protagonists as the harrowing source of their strength. These kinds of depictions are damaging to our societal views of women, and they're also detrimental to our societal understanding of sexual assault. Rape depicted as an extension of sex reinforces the views that rape is another form of sex (which it ABSOLUTELY is not). When sexual assault is used to communicate over the top evil, we forget that these atrocities are committed by people we know personally and interact with on a daily basis. When sexual brutalization is used as the source of a woman's strength, we erase that sexual assault can destroy someone's mental well being, and leaves a victim with a lifetime of trying to heal and live with their assault. All of that is bad. However, when we see the complexity of sexual assault in film (and other media), we start to get a better picture of what it means to everyone involved, and we absolutely need more of that kind of representation in our media at the moment.
Written and directed with complexity in mind: Coralie Fargeat doesn't use any of the tropes mentioned above, and instead gives you just enough context to know that sexual assault occurs, without exploiting the act for titillation purposes. The assault is also mostly seen through the eyes of a bystander who is willingly ignoring her assault. Jen's brutalization is also not the sole source of her strength, she's pushed to the edge not by the acts of her rapist, but by the betrayal of her (married) boyfriend. All of this makes this movie more nuanced than most movies containing a rape scene, never mind a rape-revenge flick, and it's honestly 400 kinds of refreshing.
Between 9 and 12 pints (or just over a gallon): That's how much blood the human body contains, but by the end of this film, they're getting close to Dead Alive levels of blood use, even though there are only 4 characters in the entire film. It sort of goes from sort of funny, to comical, to just wild by the end of the film.
But did we like it?: Hell yes! It was far more satisfying than we thought it would be, on just about every level. I would watch this movie again in a heartbeat, and I really need a pair of those earrings.
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