An ex-con (Johannes Kirsch) and his prostitute
girlfriend (Irinia Poapenko) decide to run away with each other and rob a bank
in 2008's REVANCHE, a quietly affecting and meticulously shot and directed
flick from Austria.
Exactingly directed by Gotz Spielmann, the
films visuals are as beautiful as the story is haunting. The ill-fated couple
runs afoul of a police officer (Anreas Lust) who accidentally kills Poapenko.
Kirsch is able to escape to the farm of his grandfather (Hannes Thanheiser) but
he's all but destroyed with grief.
The cop struggles with shock and grief, also,
after his accidental killing, and his wife (Ursula Strauss) struggles in her
loneliness and attempts to get pregnant. The couple happens to live near the
grandfather's farm, and when Kirsch realizes this he starts spying on them. You
can see the wheels of revenge turning in his head.
From here, the characters connect in
surprising ways. I was never sure how the movie was going to end until the last
moment, and it ended perfectly. There isn't a spare moment or visual here –
Spielmann seems to be as obsessive and precise as Kubrick. There's an
interesting dichotomy at play, here, where the movie is as ordered as the
characters are messy.
But, as in life, what seems to be chaos
eventually leads to an inevitable, unavoidable, logical conclusion, and that
makes this suspenseful drama super satisfying.
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