By the end of the year, cinemas are dominated by high-end dramas, many hoping for Oscar success. This year a striking number of them have one feature in common. Whether it’s Widows, The Favourite, Dogman, Assassination Nation, If Beale Street Could Talk, Happy New Year Colin Burstead, Lizzie or Wildlife, each story is in some way set in motion by revenge. In exploring the different facets of the revenge motif, they encapsulate film’s continued ability, even in this small-screen 21^st century, to offer a larger than life canvas on which to project both the viler fantasies, and the social conscience, of our wider culture.
Revenge works to intertwine at least two stories at once: the initial grievance and the quest for redress. It is then inherently dramatic, offering the decisive culminating action lacking from its near cousin, the grudge, yet with a suspense that is absent from the simple outburst. Widows, Steve McQueen’s female heist drama, exploits this multi-story potential most fully, weaving together a panorama of male aggressions that move from the criminal underworld and ever further outwards into the political field, the city police, and the women’s home lives. Revenge consumes the men in the film, who find in it an indispensable way of asserting their power in the world. The women are simply trying to keep alive, yet in so doing, they discover the strength of a mutual reliance that propels them towards the twists of the finale.
Revenge is played instead for all its petty ridiculousness in costume drama The Favourite. Set during an intractable war with France, a dispossessed Abigail (Emma Stone) works her way up from servant and into the very bosom of Queen Anne’s trust (Olivia Colman), displacing the Queen’s advisor Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz). The setting of the royal court stages a grotesque caricature of established power, which director Yorgos Lanthimos previously found in the patriarchal family in Dogtooth and the dystopic institution for middle-aged singles in The Lobster. Nobody here comes out smelling of roses. Abigail first arrives at the court covered in shit, pushed out of her carriage into the muddy grounds where the disaffected local peasantry defecate in disapproval at the monarch. Lady Sarah ends up literally disfigured by spite, trapped in this absurd cycle of retribution.
Revenge inevitably embitters those whose hearts it grips, yet its power lies in the universal appeal of getting one’s own back. From this perspective, revenge is not demeaning but fulfilling, offering an irresistible fantasy of catharsis for the weak. Such it is in Dogman (dir. Matteo Garrone), whose unflinchingly trusting dog-groomer protagonist embodies the loyalty ascribed to his canine clients. This man’s best friend, however, is a local bully on whose behalf our hero even serves a prison sentence. Will one final betrayal push him too far? This beautifully told story is my own personal favourite of 2018.
Common to all the films above is how they reveal revenge’s double character, involving the indulgence of animalistic anger and the ennobling pursuit of justice. The Furies were the origins of justice in classical mythology, goddesses of vengeance who in Hesiod’s Theogony were born from the drops of blood which fell to earth when Uranus’s castrated genitalia were thrown into the sea. Revenge was at the centre of the theatrical revolution of the Elizabethan stage, considered to be a primary virtue and a necessary defence of honour. But as Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet were only the most famous fictional characters to discover, revenge has a remorseless capacity to draw in innocent and guilty alike.
In this vein, Assassination Nation tells the how a middle-class American community becomes in a few short weeks beset by a modern witch-hunt. In a fantasy of social disintegration for the social media age, an anonymous hacker causes chaos by revealing the online private selves of the town’s authority figures to public scrutiny. With the frenetic energy of a hyperactive teenager, social cohesion quickly breaks down amidst the hysteria of a moral panic. It is common for high-school movies to present their juvenile protagonists as subjects of the laws of the jungle. This film extends the logic to the rest of the adult community, and by extension to contemporary America. The town focuses its testosterone-driven aggression on our heroines, who become the scapegoats – and eventual punishers – of a world driven mad by the contradictions of its own hypocrisy.
As the witch-hunt allegory suggests, vengeance all too often provides the cloak by which aggression masks itself as defence. Marcel Proust observed that only in the rare cases of direct sadism does cruelty recognise itself as such; much more often, persecutors need a scenario in which their cruelty can be imagined as only a righteous response to a perceived attack. In our current times of right-wing extremism, hatred is legitimised through narratives of false victimhood; blaming migrants for economic devastation while rewarding bankers, and appointing sex attackers to the Supreme Court while their accusers pay the price in public vilification.
This contemporary context gives added relevance to the elegiac If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Moonlight. It tells the story of a romance conducted through the glass of a prison visiting-room, after a vindictive white policeman makes an innocent young black man pay for the crime of standing up for his girlfriend. The setting of this adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel of racism and love in a divided America is the 1970s. Its vision of the complexities of relationships conducted under broader conditions of oppression is only too relevant, in a poignant drama of black America kept down by a white power structure enforced through a false claim to protecting public safety.
While revenge in all its different forms is manifest upon our screens as this year comes to a close, the possibility to really put things right will have to wait until we have changed our world for the better. In this, next year’s cinema will need to take its cue from reality.

Image via Vox