De la colère intime au carnage stylisé

From Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, where revenge adopts the codes of the crime film and melodrama to portray women who will not be stopped, to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, in which violence turns back on a society that creates, then rejects, the “monster” it has fashioned, these films trace an evolving vision of female vengeance. Shortly thereafter, I Spit on Your Grave (1978) - a controversial yet formative film - paves the way for the rape-and-revenge movie, situating female revenge within a cinema that was still marginal and transgressive. More recent films shift the focus: Gone Girl and Promising Young Woman expose the toxicity of social norms, while Revenge confronts trauma cinema head-on. Whether emerging in the baroque elegance of Lady Vengeance or the pop irony of 9 to 5, revenge becomes a strategy, a performance, or a form of liberation.

Through these works, cinema explores paths of reconstruction beyond imposed narratives and embodies the rage of heroines who refuse their fate, tracing fifty years of figures who cannot be reduced to victims.