Don’t
say payback is a you-know-what and whatever you do, don’t say it wasn’t
personal. Eve is in no mood to hear it. After months of captivity, she has
turned the tables on her sex fiend tormentor. However, her revenge gets a
little more complicated when she gets a sense of the scope of his operation in
José Manuel Cravioto’s Reversal,
which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
The
odious Phil always said Eve was special, but he never knew how right he was.
After cold cocking him with a loose brick, Eve fashions a choker-noose to keep
him controllable, but at arm’s length. She nearly capped him right then and
there, but held off once he revealed the existence of other women at various
hiding places. Fueled by outrage, Eve forces the sexual predator to take her to
each one of them, but every successive trip never turns out to be as simple as
she hopes.
You
have to give Cravioto credit for understanding the point of a vicarious revenge
thriller. We don’t want to mention any names, like Eli Roth, but there are a
number of frustrating films playing in Sundance in which we wait for the poor
central characters to turn the tables on their tormentors, but the sadistic
antagonists just keep batting them down at every turn. That’s just no fun to
watch.
In
contrast, Reversal starts with the
table-turning and follows Eve’s efforts to maintain the upper hand going
forward. Granted, it is a dark and disturbing milieu to wade through, but the
resulting comeuppance is undeniably satisfying. Thankfully, Cravioto never
cheapens the proceedings with a lecture on violence or a lame ironic ending.
Frankly,
it is also rather meta-creepy that Richard Tyson, the star of Zalman King’s
1980s softcore sex dramas plays the thoroughly gross Phil, but he is effective
in the part. Likewise, Tina Ivlev is pretty awesome as the empowered and embittered
Eve. There are too many flashbacks mixed into the action and none of its third
act reveals are remotely as surprising as screenwriters Rock Shaink, Jr. and
Keith Kjornes think they are, but the film delivers what it promises.
