In a way this counts as an entry in the wronged woman exacts her revenge genre except that it takes place in the real world where a crazy spree of unbridled violence would never work and the protagonist is intelligent enough not to even attempt such a thing. This is the debut feature of its director Emerald Fennell and I’m very impressed with how far the film takes its central conceit. This is a little too straightforward in its direction as it pretty much lacks any subtlety whatsoever but it really doesn’t dumb anything down and avoids making any mistakes with regards to plausibility. That makes it a solid win in my book.

Cassie Thomas works in a coffeeshop and lives with her parents at the age of 30, seeming to harbor no great ambitions. At night however she dresses up to go to bars and clubs and pretends to be drunk. When men tries to pick her up for sex even when she seems too inebriated to consent, she perks up suddenly to scare them. When she meets a former classmate, Ryan, at the coffeeshop, we learn that she was once a medical student but dropped out. Ryan is now a doctor and when they go out on a date together, he casually mentions how another former classmate, Al, is soon getting married to a bikini model. Though Ryan is unaware of this, we gather that Al had raped Nina, Cassie’s best friend, at school and this led to Nina’s suicide and Cassie dropping out. Even as she feels attracted to Ryan and starts a relationship with him, she starts planning revenge on those people who were responsible.

This is one of those films that is all about a single issue and bludgeons the audience over the head with it like a sledgehammer. It makes some sense here however and is justified. This is the sort of crime that should be shocking, that the perpetrators should be punished for, that bystanders who could have done something but didn’t should be ashamed of. But in this film and I suppose in the US, it is all too often waved away as a passing mistake of youth or the expected consequence of getting drunk. In this sense, Cassie’s form of vengeance is much more satisfying than just physically harming those responsible. She wants to force them to admit that they were wrong, to force them to feel what it would be like if the same thing happened to them or someone they actually care about. By now, it’s a bit stale how all the guys who claim themselves to be nice guys are inevitably the worst, taking up the role only as a means towards sex. But Fennell emphasizes the point by deliberately casting male actors who are known for their wholesome roles as the ones who fall into Cassie’s traps and that is pure brilliance.

Single-issue films like this won’t ever be truly great in my book because they’re so narrowly focused and every character feels like they were created to fill a specific niche in the scenario and never seem fully real. For example, when it sets up Ryan to be the perfect boyfriend, it goes way overboard by having him sing and crack adorably dorky little jokes. In that sense, this film feels so very American, emphasizing the cause instead of the more European style of evoking a more organic realism. But it does matter how fully developed and how well thought out this film is. I especially appreciated how it makes clear that Cassie’s campaign of revenge brings her no lasting satisfaction and arguably is a form of self-harming as well. As the well-meaning people around her point out, the only way out for her is to move on but she just can’t let go and can’t accept that the wrongs done against her friend would be forgotten by the world just like that. There’s no sense of triumph or vindication in what she does, just ugly payback and that feels about right for a film like this.

Overall this is a very impressive feature film debut for the actress turned director Fennell and yes, I do realize that she has made a very American film while being British herself. In lesser hands, this could so easily have become another not very noteworthy revenge flick, but the film is actually better than its premise suggests it might be.