Revenge

Coralie Fargeat's first feature, and it takes the most exhausted structure in the genre and rebuilds it from the camera up.

The assault is brief and shot from a distance, with the camera on a man eating a sweet in the next room. Fargeat has been explicit that the point was to remove any possible pleasure from it, and the film spends its opening twenty minutes doing the opposite: filming Jen the way the men look at her, in slow pans and close-ups, so that the switch lands as an accusation.

After that it is a survival film in the desert with a peyote sequence, a tree, and an enormous amount of blood. Matilda Lutz is barely dressed and never once framed as a victim.

The last twenty minutes are a slick-floor fight in a modernist house that has to be seen.

Removing the assault from view takes nothing away from the structure, which is the argument the whole subgenre needed somebody to make.