MEDITATIONS ON REVENGE — Veronica Phillips’ August Cinema Club Recommendations
Films centered upon the notion of revenge—be it flawed, cathartic, impossible, or otherwise.
Oldboy (2003)
Dae-su Oh (Choi Min-sik) has spent fifteen years in confinement for seemingly no reason, and with no real understanding of who or what put him in a mysterious tiny room. All he knows is that he’s desired revenge since being trapped. Once he’s out (under similarly mysterious circumstances), he’s ready to destroy anyone even peripherally related to his kidnapping. Soon, Dae-su is caught in a revenge ouroboros, a case of the chicken and the egg regarding wrongdoings and punishment. Oldboy violently, loudly, and uncomfortably considers what is truly just or rational in terms of punishment and revenge—especially when it comes to love and family.
Riders of Justice (2020)
After losing their wife and mother to a seemingly random and deeply traumatic event, military man Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) and his daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), are left reeling. The duo stands at opposite ends of a spectrum in their search for useless attempts at closure. Mathilde wants to make sense of a senseless tragedy by retracing endless steps, while Markus wants to find a perfect scapegoat to punish with militant rigor. A film about chance, vengeance, and shit hitting the fan for the sake of it, Riders of Justice believes in the fruitlessness of hunting for a different ending or neat closure to an unchangeable event.
Audition (1991)
Asami (Eihi Shiina) is seemingly the quintessential dream wife—young, beautiful, and talented. She instantly woos movie producer Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) , who is running faux auditions to find a new wife. But Asami doesn’t take well to men manipulating, hurting, or degrading her. And for Asami to seek revenge on you is to be subjected to particularly brutal forms of torture. Whether horrific or utterly cathartic depending on who you are and how you’ve behaved, Audition is a delicious, squirm worthy watch.
Thelma & Louise (1991)
After murdering a man in what should be clear as day self-defense, if not for Thelma’s (Geena Davis) dancing on the man earlier in the night (something that should hardly be considered “asking for it”, but which we know is so often deemed as such), best friends Thelma and Louise (Susan Sarandon) are on the run. Their shame about the murder—as well as their long-held belief that femininity, womanhood, and submission are a state they must conform to—quickly fade into feelings of freedom and rage. Thelma and Louise are ready to make the people who held them down pay up; and if they can’t find them, they’ll take it out on the people that represent their previously limited lives.
JINN STORIES — Alisha Mughal’s August Cinema Club Recommendations
Growing up, my mom and grandmother would tell us stories of beings that lived alongside us but that we couldn’t see. Sometimes, they would reveal themselves. They, appearing as animals or humans, would do something just a little bit off-kilter to sow a quiet, simmering kind of fear in us, perhaps to influence us. An arm would extend just a little bit longer than it ought to, a man would stand just a tiny bit taller than he ought, and innocuous gusts of air would carry something that stuck to a person. These beings, these deceptively innocuous phenomena, are jinn, created by Allah of fire and air. Growing up, I always thought of jinn as a corollary to humans, living their life alongside us, though on a plane we couldn’t see. And this is true to the Quran in a certain sense — jinn are held accountable for their actions in the way we are, they can be good or bad, believers or non-believers. They can influence us or possess us, according to belief. I would listen in awe to stories of people who would have many jinn in their control, and they would protect their master, punish those who wronged them, or perhaps they wouldn’t.
Though, according to mythology, jinn don’t necessarily have to be evil beings, I do think it’s deeply entertaining when films explore horrific manifestations of these mercurial creatures. The following films are about jinn, casting them as something approximate to demons in Christian mythology, but I would say they’re a great watch because of the captivating dynamic they portray — they are our adversaries, punitive and vengeful, or they are helpers, working to reveal something about ourselves and our mislaid society. As with most myths, jinn stories, and these films, are often about something grander, something very human, a lesson we’re not yet ready to learn. These movies, hopefully, will not disappoint.
Kandisha (2020)
This French horror follows a teen girl who, after being brutally assaulted by her ex, summons a jinn for revenge; things soon and terrifyingly get out of control. This film is subtle and simmering, deeply complex as it portrays the forces that shape and destroy singular lives. Not only does it interrogate gender dynamics within virulent and broken patriarchy, but it also delivers beguiling frights. I think this film is a stunner for all the ways in which it, with a deeply feminist understanding, shows us how our broken society doesn’t spare anyone.
Qorin (2022)
This Indonesian horror is a bit rough around the edges, but I would say it’s brave in a very delicate sort of way. Taking place in an Islamic boarding school, the film follows a girl in her final year who is well on her way to graduating with the highest honors. But when her teacher has her entire cohort perform a ritual to summon their Qorin jinn, a kind of double or doppelganger, as part of their final exam, things go wildly out of control. Examining friendship and solidarity in the face of masculine rage, abuse, and power, this film is trenchant and timely.
Under the Shadow (2016)
Taking place within the cold shadow of 1980s post-revolution Tehran, Iran, Under the Shadow follows a mother and her daughter as they cope with life under a strict, conservative regime and a war whose missiles bring, in addition to destruction, something ancient and sinister to their home. I love this movie for its acute and piercing depiction of the double standards of a hypocritical political ideology, along with the complex manner in which it casts the protagonist, a young mother who is perhaps cold — not molten and saccharine in the way we are used to seeing mothers — but is still trying her best within an impossible situation. But most of all, I love this film for its jinns that look exactly as I imagined them when I was young — toothy mouths for faces, a chador-clad gust of air, naked humans crawling through cracks in the walls.
Dabbe: The Possession (2013)
This film might be more in line with the exorcism movies we are familiar with in the West. An academic follows an exorcist into a rural town in Turkey to work with a young woman who began acting violently a few days before her wedding. Believing her to be possessed by a jinn, the exorcist helps the young woman and her family to root out the problem. This film’s plot twists and winds, but I would argue it does so deliciously, of the ways in which it reveals nefarious aspects of human nature.