Do Revenge

This clever high school black comedy feels like a spiritual successor to 1988’s classic Heathers, with its combination of great lead performances with an intelligence, subversive and topical script.

Premise: High school queen bee Drea (Camila Mendes) finds her perfectly constructed public image destroyed when an intimate video that she sent to her boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) is leaked to the whole school. After becoming a pariah overnight, Drea meets Eleanor (Maya Hawke), a fellow social outcast whose reputation was ruined years ago by Carissa (Ava Capri), and before long, the pair have made a pact to cover their tracks by getting revenge on each other’s enemy.

Review:

Like some of the best high school movies (including Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Easy A), Do Revenge is actually inspired by an existing story – in this case, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train. But whereas that film saw two strangers on a train agree to 'swap’ murders so that neither would be a suspect in an unconnected killing, Do Revenge sees two high schoolers agree to ‘do each other’s revenge’ on their tormentors, so that neither will be found out and expelled.

Director and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who also co-wrote Thor: Love and Thunder with Taika Waititi) takes this simple premise, but does some really interesting things with it. Firstly, the themes and subject matter dealt with in the film feel like they couldn’t be more topical, touching on issues like revenge porn, white privilege, class divides and gender inequality, but managing to do so in a subversive and darkly comic way. For example, Drea is convinced that her intimate video was leaked by her boyfriend Max (played to smarmy yet ambiguous perfection by Austin Abrams), but Max presents himself to the rest of the school as the ‘real victim’ of the whole scandal, establishing the (oh-so-brilliantly named) “Cis Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League” and becoming labelled an “accidental feminist” as a result.

“…one of the film’s strengths is its supporting cast…”

The incidents which give rise to Drea’s and Eleanor’s need for revenge also feel more inventive than they might have been. Drea (Camila Mendes) is certainly the lead of the movie and so her backstory involving the leaking of her intimate video is given centre stage, but when Eleanor (Maya Hawke) is introduced a little later as a new transfer student, we learn that she’s still traumatised, not because a former crush outed her as being gay, but because they invented a rumour that portrayed her as a sexual predator. Neither of these incidents feel like the kind of thing we would necessarily have seen in a high school movie even a decade ago.

One of the film’s strengths is its supporting cast, which even includes some great cameos from Sarah Michelle Gellar as the headmaster of the prestigious school, and Sophie Turner as one of Drea’s ‘frenemies’. A lot of the background characters are fleshed out in interesting ways – not only does Austin Abrams bring shades to Max, but Alisha Boe also adds depth to Drea’s former best friend Tara, and Rish Shah gets a chance to build on his impressive recent breakthrough role in Ms Marvel.

“…Camila Mendes somehow manages to keep Drea sufficiently likeable throughout the movie…”

That said, as good as the supporting cast is, Do Revenge is essentially a two-hander that’s carried by Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke, both of whom are more than up to the task. I’d only seen Camila Mendes in the (excellent) Palm Springs before this, and she’d made an impact in that film despite having a relatively small role – but in this movie, she provides the audience’s main point of view with her voiceover narration. Camila Mendes somehow manages the (not easy) task of keeping Drea sufficiently likeable throughout the movie, even when some of the stuff she’s done in her past – and during the course of this film – might otherwise have lost her the audience’s sympathy.

Maya Hawke, meanwhile, initially appears to be playing a character superficially quite similar to her fan-favourite role from Stranger Things, but given the subject matter of this film, it’s perhaps not surprising that her performance as Eleanor actually has many more layers to it – not to mention that Eleanor also undergoes that rite of passage that’s in so many high school movies ... an image-changing makeover.

“…cleverer & more inventive than I was expecting…”

Overall, this dark satire is cleverer and more inventive than I was expecting, and even if its pacing has a little bit of a wobble in the final act, it’s still one of the best high school comedies of recent years, and it can proudly take its place alongside the all-time greats of the sub-genre. All that, plus Do Revenge is worth watching just to hear what Eleanor named her pet lizard...