Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with another review from Fantastic Fest! This time we’re looking at Hong Kong thriller Revenge: A Love Story. After the shitty crap-show that was Human Centipede 2 I needed a great flick to cleanse my palate and I found that very palate cleanser in Revenge: A Love Story.
It might not be able to compete with the best of the best of Korean Revenge flicks, but Revenge: A Love Story is a great film. Well-directed doesn’t even begin to describe this movie. Ching-Po Wong’s direction being precisely spot on was absolutely crucial to the film working.
I love it when a filmmaker can change your perspective in a movie. Revenge: A Love Story starts out like a Memories of Murder/Se7en serial killer flick about a dude who slices up pregnant girls and removing their unborn children. “Oh, man,” I thought. “I can’t wait to see this guy get caught!”
We see this cruel bastard pretty early on. He’s methodical, cold and calculating, showing no emotion. What begins as a by-the-numbers procedural quickly changes when the audience is clued in to a few things, most notably that the killer may in fact have been targeting the very cops investigating the crime from the beginning.
This film is very, very smart, playing with convention to such a degree as to keep the audience from checking out as the formula plays out. If you watch a lot of films falling into a lulling rhythm is a big danger, especially at a film festival. This film took my perspective and twisted it, taking my sympathies from one place to another in a few seconds using nothing but effortless storytelling.
As a result I wasn’t ever sure what was waiting me around the corner. Surprise, that’s the key ingredient here. There’s a car crash that is nothing short of spectacular, a gun-shot death unlike any I’ve ever seen, and a love story that is as real and affecting as any Jane Austen story, but told in a horribly fucked up way in an even more awful world.
Juno Mak plays the murderer and balances multiple levels of character complexity, first making us hate his guts and in a blink of an eye getting us on his side. It’s a hell of a range and Mak handles it well. I was surprised to find out he was a singer, but kudos to him for kicking ass.
Sola Aoi plays the sweet Wing, a girl that is simple to the point of mental disability, but so sweet and innocent that you understand why she has such an impact on Mak, who isn’t exactly the brightest crayon in the box himself. And IMDB says she was in a movie called The Big Tits Dragon which automatically makes her one of the coolest people in the known universe.
All in all, I found Revenge: A Love Story to be both shocking and touching, gross and reserved, sweet and horrible and, best of all, unpredictable. There are character turns that are genuinely unexpected and an ending that should make you stand up and cheer.
To the best of my knowledge this one hasn’t picked up US distribution, but it’s too good to fall through the cracks. We’ll see some kind of release, no doubt in my mind.
More Fantastic Fest goodies on the way, including my thoughts on Juan of the Dead, Norwegian flick Headhunters and a few other goodies I’ve got squirreled away!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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