Lam Nai-Choi's Her Vengeance is HK Sleaze at its finest in many respects, a rape-revenge fantasy flick that wholly embraces its masochistic impulse for vengeance at all costs. Brusque and forceful direction coalesces with the film's straightforward narrative conception eliciting primal reactionary energy in which the thirst for vengeance obfuscates all else. The narrative itself finds a woman who is sexually assaulted transformed into a single-focused entity, and throughout the course of her path to vengeance she sees a wide swath of those who are close to her caught in the cross-fire. While many films of this ilk would aim to deconstruct the short-sided nature of vengeance, Her Vengeance is a CAT III film that is far more interested in the cultural indictment, shrugging off such concerns to deliver a pointed commentary on a society in which a woman who is sexually assaulted ultimately have to take manners into their own hands. In the film's climactic finale - one featuring the most compelling use of a wheelchair I've seen in cinema - operating subtextually as a rejection of ableism on a pure, visceral level - Her Vengeance does provide a moment for its young protagonist to expound her emotional trauma after the bloodshed is ceased and those she loves have been extinguished in the cross-fire, and yet the final shot involves a sense of accomplishment and clairvoyance, drawing inspiration from the long ranger motif in Western films with the endless horizon of the desert being replaced by the rain-soaked streets of Hong Kong
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
|