To derail for a minute (I know, who would expect such a thing from me?) This is touted as a Shudder original. Which made me wonder just how that worked. To my mind I think of an “original” as being something that Shudder commissioned to be made. That seems logical. But it’s not. Revenge was debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Shudder had acquired distribution rights before this. I feel this makes it more of a Shudder Exclusive than a Shudder Original. Shudder didn’t fund the film being produced, just stepped in for distribution. Am I quibbling here. Absolutely. But this feels like a semantics argument that matters deeply within my brain even if nowhere else (much like the comic topic of trade vs original graphic novel. Most people don’t care, but when it is misused my brain crawls around agitatedly in a counter clockwise circle inside my head.)

Back to the movie. With spoilers.

The movie starts with a helicopter dropping Jen and Richard off at a remote luxury home for a romantic getaway. When two gun toting men show up things get momentarily awkward. The men though (Dimi and Stan) are friends of Richard who showed up a day earlier than they were supposed to for their trophy hunting getaway. Things take a twist when Stan rapes Jen and Richard’s response to it is sending her away in a manner that won’t affect his family life, because of course he is married with kids. When she objects it results in a chase and Jen being pushed off a cliff where she is awkwardly impaled on a tree. (A unique to me experience at this moment had me recalling the moment in SubSpecies where Radu is killed by being tossed off the castle and being impaled on a tree just as dawn was about to break and burn up his vampiric ass. Which moved into a sequel with a great opening where as dawn breaks and he catches fire, the tree limb breaks plunging him into the body of water below and he survives!)

And this starts the titular revenge portion. She manages to survive the fall in part by setting fire to the tree which then breaks. Freeing her. Which starts my major issue with this movie. The bad guys return to deal with the body, because making her disappear is a better plan than leaving an impaled body on a tree. But she is gone! Luckily there is a blood trail leading away. A major blood trail. Like if you took a bottle of water and splashed it over a three foot span. Again and again. For a significant distance. With that much blood loss, she would have been dead after 50 feet. We have no real frame of reference for how far she travelled, but the trail ends with her getting into a reasonably fast moving river. The three bad guys split up to try and find her. Stan (the rapist) opts to stay put in case she comes back. Richard goes upstream and Dimi goes downstream with the intent of working back up to where Stan is waiting. Naturally Jen is downstream and winds up getting into a fight with Dimi and kills him in the water, leaving his body in the water as she wanders off into a cave to lick her wounds.

The next morning at the spot where Stan has not moved the whole time, Dimi’s body shows up. Somehow he floated upstream. That’s not how water works, even if it is more cinematic. A minor thing, but it was bothersome to me.

Skipping forward, the final showdown between Richard and Jen occurs back at the house. There is a unique and interesting circular path through the bathroom hallway area that comes into play here. When Jen shows up, she blows a hole through Richard’s gut. A massive wound that he is bleeding profusely from. I didn’t mention it earlier, but the average human has less than 2 gallons of blood in them. You will lose consciousness after half of that is gone. We all can relate to the amount of liquid in a gallon of milk, and if you aren’t a milk drinker a 2 liter bottle of soda is about half a gallon. In the earlier scene, I would guess that Jen easily lost about 3-4 gallons of blood based on the trail they followed alone. But in the shootout finale with Richard the amount of blood lost had to be about 12 gallons or more. At one point the hallway looks like someone spilled a full mop bucket of water (or blood rather.) And that doesn’t account for the tremendous amount in the living room. I was going to add a picture of it, but can’t find any.

So my quibbles aside, and they were rather significant. I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. In spite of the flaws that gnawed away at me throughout. The characters were interesting and well done, with the exception of Dimi who felt like he was added in order to get extra length because tracking down and killing three people takes longer. Sex is a big portion of the plot. The whole reason that Jen and Richard are there is to have a sex filled getaway without his family knowing. The rape scene itself though is very suggestive, but doesn’t show anything. An interesting aspect that I attribute to a woman director is the lack of gratuitous nudity of Jen. Looks of sexy shots, but nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach or pool. Richard on the other hand has several moments of gratuitous full frontal nudity. For so long the typical movie has had lots of female nudity and zero male nudity. I’m not saying I want to see male nudity all the time in movies, but if we are going to have female nudity then it makes sense to balance the equation.

The journey that Jen goes through is the key. At the start of this, she is just a trophy. Not even a trophy wife, but a trophy side girlfriend. And she is comfortable with this to a degree. In order to survive the tree impalement she has to dig deep into a part of herself she has not delved into before. When she moves against Dimi you can see how she has gone past a line. Wanting to exact revenge against the three who tried to kill her. The fight against Dimi has her at a massive disadvantage. But she manages to overcome his overconfidence. Leaving that with weapons we can see how she has begun transforming. The cave scene which I didn’t go into brings Jen out from her metaphysical chrysalis into the realm of a badass. The Jen that leaves this movie is wholly changed into someone new. I don’t know that there is a movie there, but it would be fascinating to see a short follow up.

Eventually though I have to rate the movie. And for a movie that I really tore into for some significant flaws, I can’t help but want to give this movie a favorable rating. 7 stars in spite of the problems I had with it feels right to me. I wouldn’t object to watching this movie again, but I don’t see me seeking it out. And not sure it qualifies as a good date night flick.