Skip to main content

A Vigilante review – feminist domestic-abuse revenge drama

Olivia Wilde is on a quest to help victims of violence in this tough, tense tale imbued with a commendable naturalism

The American writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson makes a seriously impressive debut here with her feminist domestic-abuse revenge fantasy featuring a lean performance by Olivia Wilde as Sadie, a lone-wolf vigilante who helps mostly female victims of abuse to escape using considerable force and asking for nothing in return but a little cash or food. It’s tough, tense movie with a couple of bone-snappingly violent moments, but critically it dials down the exploitation. You don’t have to sit through gratuitous assaults on women.

This is a film rich with the texture of real life, shot in cold, grey wintry upstate New York where business is booming for Sadie. Disguised in a blond wig she poses as an insurance rep at the home of a controlling husband – a scary guy with ramrod posture wearing a crisp, creaseless white shirt. After a few minutes with Sadie, the shirt is covered in blood. So, too, is the keyboard of his computer as he transfers two-thirds of his life savings to his wife. After escorting him to the front door, Sadie returns to her scummy motel room. Next, with auburn hair and painted-on freckles she rescues two boys from their sadistic mother. You could imagine Netflix making this into a series, with each case teased out into an episode.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2wsSk00
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more