先发制人

Ditching her partner-in-crime Steve Oram from Ben Wheatley’s SIGHTSEERS (2012), a movie puts her name on the map, British generalist Alice Lowe again, goes on a killing spree in her directorial debut PREVENGE, alone but not alone, as its title’s coinage proclaims, her character Ruth is carrying a baby girl, and this unborn fetus (heard through an irksome child voice) ostensibly leans on and cajole her gravid widow mother to avenge the death of the father whom she is deprived a chance to meet.

A shoestring revenge tale (shot in 11 days) told in a chronological fashion seeing Ruth track down a total 6 individuals who are responsible for the death of her husband (Bessant), sequentially and bloodily murder them (save for the last one in the abrupt and ambivalent ending). Her modus operandi is straight-forward, catching them unawares and slashing their throats, mostly, although a quasi-catfight with Len (Whelan) is too idiosyncratic to take it seriously, who needs to wear a pair of boxing gloves in the life-or-death face-off? The truth is, PREVENGE can be deemed lousy by the slasher criteria, but Lowe punctuates its gory but routine business with a combo of wry gusto and quirky irrationality, say, after she surgically castrates the libidinous DJ Dan (Davis), she is patient enough to tuck the latter's pixelated mother (Hoffman) in and does the laundry she has promised her before leaving the bloody scene.

However, barring those scintillating wheezes, PREVENGE is dead serious in a mother’s antenatal anxiety and psychogenic delusion, with her grounds of vengeance fitfully teased through repeated images, and no sooner than the middle point, the cat has already been let out of the bag, the funny point is, a viewer may lean to second with her alleged wrong-doers, under certain unfortunate circumstances, sacrifice must be exacted to preempt a bigger disaster, right? Which makes the whole enchilada paradoxical and mean-spirited.

“Ruth must be ruthless”, her victims range from a creepy pet shop owner (whose reptilian and arachnid collections also double as the visual pointer of Ruth’s vile outburst), a sybarite mommy’s boy, a frigid high-flying woman pontificating in a clinical corporate office room and et cetera, the only unintended casualty is Josh (Wozniak), a seemingly nice guy who simply chooses the wrong roommate and appears at the wrong time, and this apparently serves as a wakeup call to her defunct moral compass, but that is a false promise, as personal corollaries are vanishingly omitted in the storyline (the baby is fine, she clearly is not), and augmented by its flaccid conjuration of a last-shot surprise, Lowe’s quickie project is somehow mired in its own cynicism, quirkiness and rashness, but still, thanks to it, this reviewer discovers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s CRIME WITHOUT PASSION (1934), truly, only an ill wind that blows no good.

referential entries: Park Chan-wook’s THE STOKER (2013, 7.4/10); William Oldroyd’s LADY MACBETH (2016, 7.9/10).