The plot of Academy Award nominated Promising Young Woman (finally available to watch on Sky Cinema and NOW TV) centres on Cassie who adopts a novel approach to avenging the rape of her friend.
Revenge has featured as a key theme in literature and drama virtually since writing began, from Euripides (Medea) and Seneca (Thyestes) to Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus), Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo) and more recently Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl).
The Jacobean era (1603-25) saw an intense interest in retribution as the subject matter for plays, with a fair few still performed to this day, works such as The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford) and The Malcontent (John Marston).
On the silver screen, vengeance has always been a popular subject for cinemagoers, reaching a nadir of sorts in the 1970s with the trio of Straw Dogs (1971), Death Wish (1974) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978).
Motivations for revenge in the movies vary; in some cases, revenge is enacted for the pettiest reasons (such as an overheard insult in Ripley’s Game, 2002), in others it’s a response to suffering acts of appalling violence (Jodie Foster in The Brave One, 2007).
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