An imaginative blend of classic monster movies and British black comedy, Prevenge offers the delightful variety of film historical references characteristic of a directorial debut. Yet despite callbacks to everything from ‘30s thrillers through ‘70s body horror to art house fare like Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, director-writer-star Alice Lowe (who starred in and co-wrote the latter), has made a film that transcends its influences as it revels in gore and deadpan laughs, its familiar tropes driven by a boldly original perspective.
The film tells the story of Ruth (Lowe), a recently-widowed pregnant woman attempting to cope with the death of her husband as well as the immense physical and emotional transformations that come with child-bearing. Her coping mechanism is unusual: she vengefully murders all of the people tangentially related to her husband’s death in a climbing accident. Crucially, the slayings are commanded by her daughter in-utero, who seems to relish the violence mom commits on her behalf.
Typical of movie monsters, Ruth is a hero, villain and victim all in one. She avenges the negligence she believes led to her husband’s death, albeit by gleefully violent means. Yet Ruth is still a sympathetic figure, a victim of circumstance and of demonic demands from her baby, who threatens to kill Ruth in childbirth unless her every commands are followed. A hostage who believes her life hangs in the balance, the pregnant woman is physically transformed, maniacally transgressive and trapped within the confines of her monstrosity.
Prevenge uses a classic template to sometimes literally scream in protest at the contemporary treatment of expectant mothers. Pregnant when she wrote the film, Lowe completed production it in a two-week flurry just before giving birth. Dialogue and storyline rail against the very infantilization of pregnant women that she experienced herself. Ruth’s self-abnegation, to the point of becoming a serial killer to please her baby, is a satiric jab at the façade of a modern society that deludes itself into thinking it knows how to fairly treat women, much less expectant mothers.
While the film’s chief target may be misogyny and the patriarchy, Lowe’s biting satire does not spare women. Ruth has no patience for the cold, careerist lawyer unwilling to hire a pregnant woman, the hyper-fit triathlete that punches her baby bump or even the well-intentioned if overbearing midwife. The pregnant-woman-as-monster threatens to destroy the very foundations of British civilization as she cuts her path of hormonally driven assassinations across Wales.
The film lags in its second act, relying too heavily on a great premise that becomes repetitive. But it it’s worth sitting through a few dull chapters for a sinister closing flourish. In addition to Lowe’s fluent direction, the film benefits from an energetic score and crisp neo-noir cinematography that savors the banality of British daily life—pubs, offices, and residential streets fill every frame. Prevenge is a hilarious and bloody middle finger to basically everyone, because no one knows how to preserve the basic dignity of pregnant women.
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