13 revenge thrillers that take vengeance off the beaten path

Trawling the direct-to-video trenches for a decent thriller can be rough. That’s why it’s heartening to see directors like Jesse V. Johnson keeping things lively with inventive action like Avengement, his most riotously entertaining collaboration yet with martial artist Scott Adkins (John Wick: Chapter 4). Through a bit of criminal naïveté, once-promising fighter Cain Burgess (Adkins) is sent to London’s most violent prison, where he battles an endless brigade of hired knives paid to kill him. Cain hones his body into an engine of punishment, and when his mother dies, he busts loose to find the man responsible for the hits: Cain’s brother, Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass). Set largely in a single location—an English pub—Cain regales Lincoln and his cronies with this bloody story; Adkin’s physical presence, established through the film’s many bruising fight sequences, keeps things at a perpetual simmer. When fury gets the better of him, Avengement turns scalding hot.

You’ve heard stories about people going into the desert, taking peyote, and coming back changed. Not like this. Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge is a different kind of trip: Jen (Matilda Lutz), a young model with dreams of L.A. glory, takes a weekend fling with her wealthy (and married) boyfriend, Richard (Kevin Janssens). All goes to plan until Richard’s hunting buddies (Guillaume Bouchède and Jean-Louis Tribes) arrive and set their wandering eyes on Jen. Revenge is a brutal piece of business that’s sure to make even hardened genre hounds flinch, but it’s Fargeat’s gnarly fascination with physical sensation—taste and touch, the squidgy sounds of blood and gore, an intrusive male gaze begging to be put out—that puts it in the realm of cult-exploitation legend. Revenge is the stuff of nightmares, the fuel for conflict, and an eminently satisfying movie besides.

What a face-off: Terence Stamp versus Peter Fonda. What a picture: The Limey, a soft-boiled crime thriller from Steven Soderbergh, who tasks his editor (Sarah Flack of Lost In Translation) with cutting his film into a rat-a-tat of L.A. easiness and beguiling sunshine vibes. But, yes, there’s also the small matter of retribution, and it’s here where The Limey looms large: flying in from London after years tucked away in a British hoosegow, Wilson (Stamp) scours Los Angeles for information regarding the death of his daughter (Melissa George, in flashes). Soderbergh’s light touch makes Wilson’s vengeance quest feel like a stroll, and with companions like Luis Guzmán, Lesley Ann Warren, and Bill Duke, it’s almost unacceptable that it has to end. But end it must. A standard potboiler given grace through Soderbergh’s poetic nods to the past, lending this a surprising sense of poignancy before it’s all over.

The tempo of Alan Rudolph’s 1978 thriller Remember My Name is downbeat but consistent and unnerving. It follows Emily (Geraldine Chaplin), a woman acclimating to society after a nine-year prison stretch, often at the expense of other people’s patience and goodwill (as co-stars Jeff Goldblum, Alfre Woodard, and Moses Gunn discover to their woe). Soon, she begins stalking her ex-husband Neil (Anthony Perkins) and his wife (Berry Berenson), and the disturbing reasons for her incarceration begin to take shape. Remember My Name is a revenge yarn that pulls into complicated knots; it’s about evening the score (how Rudolph accomplishes this creeps up effectively and lingers), but it’s also about a person reclaiming normalcy despite having it stripped from her long ago. Hurt people hurt people, but not as Emily and Neil do in Remember My Name. You won’t forget it, or them.

Time has been kind to Only God Forgives since its 2013 release, when comparisons to Nicolas Winding Refn’s highly praised (and decidedly more marketable) Drive were closer. As a sordid, neon-soaked nightmare of duty and death that pits a most inscrutable Ryan Gosling against Vithaya Pansringarm, Refn’s ideas of retributive justice can still be polarizing. His film follows the philosophical impasse of two men: one an American ex-pat driven by Oedipal devotion to his blood-thirsty mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), who tasks him with killing the other, a Bangkok police lieutenant honor-bound to a more ancient, crueler form of justice. Violence spins out in a hideous cycle until few are left with the will, say nothing of the ability, to continue fighting. All that’s left when Only God Forgives ends is to grapple with our own ideas of what’s right and what’s worse.

To call Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin quiet is an understatement—its first moments are virtually a silent film as it observes a man in distress. This is Dwight (Macon Blair), living rough in a fugue state for the past decade following the murder of his father and mother. When he receives word that their killer has been freed, Dwight wakes up. To say anything more would give the game away, but it’s fair play to warn those seeking cheap thrills and bloody satisfaction to temper their expectations. Blair isn’t John Wick; he’s John Doe, a wisp of an angry man who doesn’t know how to wield his fury. Blue Ruin has its violence, but it’s more fascinating as a character study; Dwight’s battles aren’t flashy and choreographed but quick, ugly, and messy, the kind that leaves lasting marks on those who do it, to say nothing of us who watch it.

Sometimes, the path to revenge is one that should be impossible to travel. Combining the goth romance and supernaturalism of James O’Barr’s comic series with art direction realized by electrical tape, lo-fi scuzz, and onyx inkiness, Alex Proyas’ The Crow is an operatic fairy tale of revenge and one of the finest comic-to-film adaptations ever made. Proyas begins with the brutal murder of Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) and her rockstar fiancé, Eric Draven (Brandon Lee); after a one-year leap, Eric returns from the beyond courtesy of a mystical crow, in makeup that inspires terror from the violent denizens of Proyas’s fictionalized Detroit. The action in The Crow (co-choreographed by Lee) is blistering and immediate, but it takes a backseat to the overwhelming ache of loss brought on by the shocking death of its star. Here, art echoes reality, maximizing the hurt of Proyas’ indelibly strange, exhilarating, unforgettable tragedy.

Paul Schrader puts us in the headspace of violent people and asks us not to condone their motives, just kick them around in our own heads for a while. Vengeance fuels John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (co-written by Heywood Gould, based on a story by Schrader), and it comes in due course. Before, we consider the plight of Major Charles Rane (William Devane), a prisoner of war who’s returned home to grateful neighbors and a wife who has moved on. When bad people come to his home looking for money and take much more than that, Rane doesn’t rage—he heals, waits, and later begins his methodical, bloody work. Schrader, Flynn, and a stunningly good Devane allow us into the mind of a man pushed beyond hurt well before the worst arrived at his doorstep. We understand the pain he’s endured and that which may yet come, making his quest not glorious but tragic.

As far as 16mm no-budget revenge epics go, Jim Van Bebber’s Deadbeat At Dawn is in a class by itself. This astonishingly violent film follows two warring gangs—The Ravens, The Spyders—who battle on behalf of their myopic leaders. Van Bebber is Goose, the Raven head who loses his girl and gang to Danny (Paul Harper) and swears vengeance. What results is a one-man-versus-the-world situation—the action is best described as an unholy fusion of Lloyd Kaufman and John McTiernan—in which Goose barrels through an armada of gang members to get within striking distance of the man he hates most. The finale of Deadbeat at Dawn is thrilling due to Van Bebber’s zeal for fight choreography (his nunchucks skills stand out, especially in Ohio) and impactful editing that cranks up the energy by several improbable levels. A bleak yet energizing grindhouse fable that is vastly more than you might expect.

Park Chan-wook painted the beginnings of his Vengeance Trilogy in meticulous, forbidding lines when he created Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance, a desolate diptych of two men on a path to mutual oblivion. Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), a deaf/mute factory worker, is laid off before he can raise money for his sister’s desperately needed kidney transplant, which puts him at the mercy of a conniving black-market organ dealer. When their agreement takes a bad turn, Ryu’s anarchist girlfriend, Cha (Bae Doona), suggests they kidnap the daughter of an industrialist (Song Kang-ho) to raise the cash. Ryu’s decisions trigger a series of harrowing events meted out in Park’s darkly humorous and uncompromising fashion. As a work from an undisputed master of the revenge genre, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance might be the director’s most brutal (which is saying something). It’s certainly among the more chilling representations of the “two graves” idiom put to film.

Survival is paramount in A History Of Violence, David Cronenberg’s revelatory adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel. For Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), survival means cutting off ties to the past, changing who he is so completely that even his brother (William Hurt) does a double take—before he tries to put one between Tom’s eyes. The past comes calling for Tom, né Joey, later in the film when Cronenberg more steadily doles out his shock violence. In its first half, we believe Tom is who he says he is because Mortensen plays him so sincerely. Philly tough-guy Fogarty (Ed Harris) isn’t convinced; he might not see so good from his bad eye, but Fogarty can see the man who made it that way just fine. What follows is a journey to meet revenge head-on before it takes Tom’s life, along with the future he’s built on the bones of his past.

Getting back at a single foe is cake compared to the dilemma Thana (Zoë Lund) faces in Abel Ferrara’s sordid exploitation thriller, Ms. 45. Here, revenge is existential: How to punish an entire gender? That outré premise fits snugly within Ferrara’s scuzzy New York City, where all manner of male bottom-feeders dwell, making cat-calls, getting rough, and, in two shocking acts that send both Thana and the film into a spiral, committing sexual assault so heinous that a meek fashion seamstress becomes an avenging angel of death. As the body count grows, so does Thana’s confidence (the late Tamerlis, credited here as Lund) is astonishing in her silent role, stalking the night dressed to the nines and kissing each bullet before loading them into her dreaded .45. Godard once said, “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Yes, and an army of scum for them to annihilate.

Cenobites on all-terrain vehicles, chainsaw duels, a path to enlightenment/damnation via character actor Richard Brake, and ethereal dreamscapes designed, with reverence, to evoke the work of artist Julie Bell, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy is a revenge thriller for the books. The stars aligned when this was cast; as a mood piece largely conveyed through expression, Andrea Riseborough’s big, dark eyes say much about her character’s life before the cult maniac Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) forcefully entered the picture. The film is also calibrated, perhaps improbably, to balance Nicolas Cage’s eccentricities with his deep wells of feeling. Despite the mayhem that splatters through most of its magenta-tinged runtime, Mandy is, at its core, a valentine for weirdo lovers who know pain and have passion only for art and the one person with whom they can share it. When revenge comes, as it must, it thrills like no other.