Continuing with the task of putting a dent in the pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays that I've managed to accumulate but not yet watch, and I swear that I'm picking the movies randomly and not trying to put together any particular theme, such as "Women in Peril" or something similar. Although you'd be forgiven for thinking so with this review of the latest film, Bound to Vengeance.
A young woman, Eve, has been kidnapped, chained up and brutalised in a dirty basement, apparently for some time. When her captor brings her food she manages to surprise him with a brick to the head and escapes her chains and the house, only to discover that she's in the middle of nowhere. While looking for another way to escape she also finds Polaroids of other girls that her captor is apparently holding elsewhere, and so Eve decides that she has to free them. A psychological game then begins between Eve and her "former" captor Phil, as she threatens and forces him to take her to the other girls so that she can free them like she did herself, whilst he tries to keep her off-balance and trick her whenever he can to regain the upper hand. Will Eve be able to rescue the other girls and avenge them - and herself - or will her captor and the odds be against her?
I think I've mentioned before that I'm not the biggest fan of the rape-revenge subgenre, primarily because the majority of films take the time to show us the "rape" part in exploitative, uncomfortable detail, which usually leads to an unpleasant watch. Bound to Vengeance doesn't do that, however - after a brief shot of home movie footage to introduce us to Eve (a recurring motif in the film, but more on that later), we then get a cold open of her captor making her soup and Eve launching her escape plan. I can appreciate this in a rape-revenge movie - the filmmakers seem to be assuming that we can probably figure out what horrible things Eve (and later the other girls) have already gone through just from the setting and situation they're in, and so they only show us the bare minimum and focus more on the revenge aspect instead.
So, I think we can safely say that Bound to Vengeance is a feminist film. At no point in the film does Eve turn to, rely on or need the help of any males - police, boyfriend or passers-by included. The only person who does join her in her quest is one of the rescued girls, Lea, who is equally as determined to survive. But here's the problem - the complete lack of sympathetic male characters pushes the film out of feminist territory and into misandristic territory. Every male we meet (until the very end when some cops appear) are sexual predators who have been kidnapping women for their own purposes, whether to sell on or for their own pleasure. "Look at all these terrible men!" the film seems to say. "You can't trust a single one of them! Only trust your fellow women, they won't let you down." And misandry is, of course, just as bad as misogyny and leaves just as bad a taste in my mouth.
The film also treats two of the women that Eve tries to rescue as cruel punchlines. "He he, this one's got Stockholm Syndrome and tries to kill Eve because her captor says so!" it says at one point. Yes, it's all part of the psychological war that's going on between Eve and Phil - he trying constantly to regain the advantage over Eve by any means possible, including using the other captive girls against her - but the way it's paced feels almost like splattery slapstick. There's also the backstory between Eve and the other girl she was held captive with, who we see at the beginning has died... but we have to wait till the end of the film to discover her connection to Eve and thus the whole reason why she is so hell-bent on freeing the other women. Phil periodically makes comments about the dead girl to try to upset Eve, but because we don't fully understand the connection it doesn't actually mean all that much to us.
Finally, there's the use of the home video footage of "happier times" throughout the film. It's an interesting way of introducing backstory for our protagonist, certainly, but we keep getting little flashes of it throughout the film, sometimes at inappropriate moments, and a lot of the time we're just seeing the same clips in a different order. And again, it takes till the very end of the film to reveal what it all means. It's not the best way of filling in the backstory for your characters.
Bound to Vengeance is certainly one of the better rape-revenge movies I've seen, and it has some interesting ideas and ways of presenting them. But it's undercurrent of man-hating and its awkward pacing let it down (not to mention some confusing revelations near the end which feel almost like they were rushed through at the last minute).
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