|
|
After surviving a brutal encounter, a traumatized and broken woman attempts to seek revenge on those that raped her and filmed it before uploading the video to a dark-web site, and when she becomes friends with a sympathetic stranger she has to decide between carrying her revenge or leaving that world behind.
For the most part, there was a lot to like here. Most of the film's positives are centered around the pressing themes of how she's suffering at the hands of the trauma inflicted upon her. Witnessing the change in behavior from her usual outgoing, cheery self into the quiet, brooding mastermind attempting to use her feminine wiles and charm to seduce and then take revenge on those very men in far more graphic and brutal manners than they ever attempting on her sparks quite a shift. Seeing how she is around the nice guy at the lake with their burgeoning friendship that contradicts how cruel and vicious she is when interacting with the ones who initially scared her is a change in behavior that serves this one well due to how easily turning off each part of her personality to suit the situation as well as the believability displayed in doing so. As each part of her personality continues to fight for dominance and the exploits of what happened to continue to weigh on her no matter how she wants to be a normal person around him, seeing the impact of what happened to her create plenty of fun times here. When it comes to the revenge aspects of the film, this one works rather nicely. The brutality and viciousness she carries out in these scenes serve this one quite well, especially in the first encounter where the ambush of the videographer and then turning around to torture him for information which features quite a nice bit of low-budget indie-flavored moments. The second attack comes off the best, with the secondary twist involving the identity of the victim and how that plays out with the last-second save that manages to put the scene into a great torture sequence that gives this a dynamic missing from the other scenes featuring her in complete control from the very start. To have it play out the way it does has plenty to enjoy about it as there's some fun to be had in watching how she gets free before turning to the dark side of her psyche that carries on through the rest of the scene. As the weight of all these scenes is shown to take a toll on her, there's a lot to like about this alongside the fine gore and bloodshed of these scenes. That said, there are a few minor flaws present. Among the most pressing issues here is the fact that the film so handedly steers the viewpoint toward the men in her life as being repulsive, deviant scum that it borders on the ludicrous. To believe that everyone around her would willfully and dutifully engage in what transpires here, from setting up fake actress auditions where they rape them and put it up online in an organized ring with several high-ranking members involved in it seems quite short-sighted and there simply to prove a point for the sake of the revenge. That comes off alongside the fact that some of these scenes go on a bit too long and shouldn't be there, from the oddly-targeted speech about physical media over digital streaming that's more filmmaker propaganda than realistic dialogue or the family get-together that takes too long to get a twist out that's incredibly foreshadowed here. However, none of these are detrimental at all and don't hold this one back at all.
Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.
score 9/10
kannibalcorpsegrinder 21 March 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5566890/ |
|
21-2-2021 18:05:03