SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. I absolutely love the hallucination sequence that Jen goes through while in the cave. The moment she put the peyote in her necklace I was waiting for it to come into play. Watching her repeatedly wake up on loop questioning if she’s in reality or not adds a nice breath of fresh air to the sub-genre , provides some nice visual scares, and also had me laughing at how wonked her visions of her assailants are. Stan being a lizard was the absolute peak and watching the vision come back as she’s hunting him is great. I love that it builds up to her cauterizing her wound with the eagle beer can and “transforming” into the creature, finally being able to fly free. It’s great visual storytelling.

2. When Stan is initially raping Jen, Dimitri looks at them and then blasts the television up to drown the noise. I thought the sequence was horrifying in its demonstration of complicity. He could’ve stopped the situation , but instead he lets it happen as though it’s an everyday distraction and just works around it. It somehow feels even more mean spirited than what Stan did, which sounds absurd given the gravity of Stan’s actions.

The way Fargeat flips this at the end is poetry in motion. As the camera follows Richard in a slow on take, going around him and not revealing Jan coming in, the TV magically turns on. It creates a sense of tension because of the sudden noise while serving as a callback to the way the TV drowned out the violence before. This time however, the script is flipped, and Jan is the one enacting her revenge.

3. I love how Jen “penetrates” each of her assailants in a weird symbolic reversal of the injustice committed against her. Dimitri gets stabbed in both eyes after getting off on how he intentionally let Jen sneak up on him because his preferred hunting style is based on deceit. Stan gets glass pieces into his foot and is forced to pull them out, resulting in it becoming a bloody mess. Richard gets gut punched quite literally and it’s immensely satisfying to watch him get super egoistical the moment he has an advantage to only be reminded of who’s in charge. Each moment is satisfying in their own right and become all the more cathartic in how they relate to the original act of violence that set the movie off.