This is a film that refuses to give you what you want. It disturbs the idea that revenge will ever bring about change and exposes our complicity in rape culture in calling out our need for it.
Spoilers will follow.
Neat cinematic revenge gives us relief from rape culture, but relief is not what is needed. This is an angry and restless film, overflowingly and messily so. Not in the way you would expect, again, because this is a mainstream…
The title is misleading. This is not revenge, and the film is certainly not feminist. It is just another conventional genre film using rape as a backdrop.
Spoilers ahead:
There is no satisfaction to be had, because there is no (cinematic) revenge. Within the narrative Jen is raped and left for dead, but she doesn't come back for a "manhunt" which the misleading plot summary says. It's more of a fight to the death, where the men who already raped…
What inspired this film was a news article about a man who drowned, and the headline read "faggot drowned". Amat Escalante was so appalled by the lack of humanity that he decided to make a film exploring themes of sex, homosexuality, violence and gender roles. And it the middle of it all, simply lacking any humanity: an alien which both gives humans pleasure and destroys them. When facing the cruelty and violence in Mexico, creating a supernatural being might seem less far fetched than reality.
