I just watched a cracker of an inventive gore shocker. It starts misleadingly like some exploitation flick with a flirtatious girlie who will almost certainly get a pretty bad deal from three macho guys in isolated surroundings (title suggests she'll get her own back etc).
What makes it stand apart for me is the incentive depictions of gory injuries coupled with superb editing to make the audience jump - plus a throbbing soundtrack (no pun intended) that produces an unsettling effect throughout (think Christopher Nolan, Gaspar Noé's Irreversible or Beberian Sound Studio) at least once the intro section has finished. Works best loud or with headphones.
There's a few character holes - for instance, how does a ditzy young woman suddenly turn into fast-witted and resourceful character worthy of a marine; and injuries that would reduce most people to a blubbering mass on a hospital bed are almost brushed off with deft plot developments( yet these are standard for the genre and don't spoil the enjoyment.
Some of the gore is almost Tarantino-esque - Deathproof without the geeky, obscure cinematic references every 60 seconds, sometimes tongue-in-cheek: yet it's the suspense rather than the large amounts of blood that make it mildly spectacular.
Unlike most films that follow a similar 'revenge' theme, the characters are fairly well-developed for an action flick. The desert photography (it was filmed in the Moroccan Sahara) is quite stunning and frames any and all things not sand or rock with vivid immediacy - blood oozing onto desert ants or the sun on a swimming pool in the midst of barren wilderness.
I can't help wondering if a woman in the director's seat was responsible pulling together a taut film that ultimately manages to avoid exploiting either woke 'feminism' or chauvinistic sadism: ultimately it's just a good thriller with plenty of thought rather than excess of CGI.
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