Rape-Revenge

The structure is fixed: an assault, then a reprisal, usually by the survivor, usually with the film's sympathies fully on her side by the second half.

Where it comes from

Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960) won the Academy Award for best foreign film. Wes Craven remade it as The Last House on the Left (1972) with a fraction of the budget and none of the restraint, and the marketing line was "to avoid fainting, keep repeating: it's only a movie". Both films are the same story about a father who kills the men who killed his daughter.

The argument

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) is the case everybody uses. Roger Ebert called it the worst film ever made. Carol Clover, writing in 1992, pointed out that the camera in the second half is aligned with Jennifer throughout, that the film gives her no romantic subplot and no rescuer, and that its audience in grindhouse cinemas was not reacting the way its critics assumed. Both positions are held by serious people and neither has won.

What is not really disputed is that the first half is 30 minutes long, is filmed without any distancing technique, and is extremely difficult to sit through.

The Swedish one

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973) is the coldest film here, was banned outright in Sweden, and is the film Tarantino has said Kill Bill is built from.

Now

Revenge (2017) and Promising Young Woman (2020) reworked the shape with the assault largely off screen, which turns out to remove nothing the structure actually needs.