Punk on Film: Ladies, Enough is Enough
Ten Movies About Women Who Fight Back
If you’re not looking for a rom-com and you don’t want the comfort of a Hallmark classic where the big city girl goes home to her small town and runs into her old classmate who’s now a scrappy lumberjack that woos her into tradwife bliss…keep reading.
What I need from my cinema at the moment is some females kicking ass. No more of women being ignored, threatened, underestimated, or worse. This list is entertainment for those who aren’t interested in what happens when women are quiet or forgiving. Many of these films are going to be a hard watch, but they also illuminate harsh and uncomfortable realities and imagine what can happen when a woman says, “Enough is enough.”
1. Revenge (2017)
Coralie Fargeat's Revenge frankly takes on rape-revenge and drops it into a sun-blasted, blood-soaked desert battle. Jen is abandoned in the desert after being assaulted and left for dead. Except she isn't dead. Very much not dead.
What follows is one of the most spectacular transformations in modern revenge cinema. Jen goes from being treated like disposable property to becoming an almost superhuman force of vengeance, hunting down the men who tried to erase her. Fargeat isn't subtle about it. This isn't a movie about quietly healing from trauma. It's about survival turning into rage, rage turning into power, and power becoming dangerous. Revenge doesn't ponder whether Jen should fight back. It shows what happens when she does.
2. A Vigilante (2018)
Sadie doesn't wait for the system to fix domestic violence because she already knows it won't. After escaping her own abusive husband, she positions herself to become the person other women need when the cops, courts and institutions aren't enough. She tracks down abusers, gets women and children out, and delivers a little old-fashioned justice along the way.
What's interesting about A Vigilante is that Sadie isn't presented as some invincible action hero. She's broke. She's traumatized. She's carrying an enormous amount of damage around with her. And she's also fucking relentless.
Written and directed by Sarah Daggar-Nickson, the movie turns the vigilante fantasy into something more intimate: one woman deciding that if nobody else is going to protect these women, she will.
3. Becky (2020)
Becky is thirteen years old, pissed at her dad, pissed at the world and having a very bad weekend. When shit seems like it couldn’t be any worse…a group of escaped prisoners, led by a very creepy Kevin James, invade her family's lake house. Their mistake is assuming Becky is going to hide in a closet and wait for the adults to save her. She is not.
What follows is basically Home Alone after somebody replaced the cute kid with a deeply traumatized teenager and turned the violence up to eleven. Becky turns the lake house into a death trap, improvising weapons and traps with the kind of gleeful brutality that makes you wonder whether maybe the adults should have been paying closer attention to this kid.
Lulu Wilson is fantastic because Becky isn't suddenly transformed into some perfectly trained action hero. She’s flawed, more mad than she is scared, and ready to fight like hell. Underestimating a young woman is a vital flaw that works in this case, when someone’s got nothing to lose, they are the most dangerous.
4. Teeth (2007)
A particular dumbass representative whose career rightly collapsed (Todd Akin) while this quote of his lives on, once said, while discussing abortion exceptions for rape, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." WELL… that’s categorically not true BUT…What if the patriarchy literally got bitten in the dick? That's basically the premise of Teeth, and I’m here for it.
Dawn is a teenage abstinence activist who discovers she has vagina dentata: teeth where dental hygiene becomes a challenge. At first she's horrified. Then she begins to understand that the thing everyone has taught her to fear might actually be the thing that protects her.
Teeth is funny, gross, ridiculous and surprisingly pointed. Men who assume Dawn's body is theirs to control discover that perhaps her body has other ideas. It's body horror as feminist revenge fantasy with a powerful nether region as the star.
5. Ms. 45 (1981)
Before there was Jen in Revenge, there was Thana. Played by Zoë Lund, Thana is a mute seamstress working in New York's garment district who is attacked twice in a single day. She responds by taking a .45-caliber pistol into the streets and turning herself into a one-woman war against men. Ms. 45 is grimy, nasty, paranoid, and deeply rooted in the streets of early-'80s New York. This isn't polished feminist empowerment. It's exploitation cinema soaked in rage.
Thana barely speaks, but the movie has plenty to say. The transformation from frightened victim to vigilante isn't clean or heroic. It's ugly, obsessive, and increasingly, nobody is safe. Including the men who didn't technically do anything to her. That's where Ms. 45 gets really uncomfortable. Revenge has a way of expanding once you've decided you're done being afraid.
6. M.F.A. (2017)
Noelle is an art student whose rape is effectively shrugged off by the system (sound familiar?). After accidentally killing her attacker, she discovers something: there are a whole lot of other women whose attackers also walked away. So she starts hunting them.
M.F.A. takes the campus sexual-assault crisis and turns it into a vigilante thriller, with Noelle transforming her anger into a very literal form of justice. She's not waiting for administrators, police or anyone else to decide whether what happened to these women matters, she certainly doesn’t wait for a handwritten essay from the perpetrators of the assaults. She just decides she's going to do something about it.
Directed by Natalia Leite and written by Leah McKendrick, M.F.A. is what happens when the phrase “the system failed her” gets turned into a revenge plot.
7. Destroyer (2018)
Erin Bell is not a role model. She's not particularly likable nor is she trying to inspire anybody. She's a wreck. Nicole Kidman's detective is carrying the consequences of a disastrous undercover operation years earlier, and when the man at the center of it resurfaces, she starts tearing her way back through the people connected to her past.
Directed by Karyn Kusama, Destroyer is less straightforward female revenge fantasy and more a portrait of what happens when a woman has spent years being consumed by violence.
Erin doesn't become powerful because she finds herself. She's already powerful. That's what makes Destroyer a unique companion to the more triumphant movies on this list. Sometimes fighting back doesn't make you whole.
8. I Spit on Your Grave (1978)
One shouldn’t make a list about women fighting back without I Spit on Your Grave. I also can't talk about it without acknowledging how deeply uncomfortable this movie is. Originally titled Day of the Woman, Meir Zarchi's 1978 film follows writer Jennifer Hills after she is brutally attacked and left for dead by a group of men. When she survives, she methodically hunts them down one by one.
The film is infamous for its extremely graphic depiction of sexual violence, and that violence dominates much of the first half. It's exploitative, ugly, and difficult to watch. I’m not sure why I need to say that when sexual assault is the topic - no one should make it palatable.
It is one of the defining examples of the rape-revenge genre: the woman who survives doesn't disappear into the background of her own story. She comes back - for everybody.
9. The Nightingale (2018)
Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale follows Clare, an Irish convict in 1825 Tasmania, who pursues a British officer after horrific violence destroys her family. She sets out through the wilderness with an Aboriginal tracker named Billy, who has his own reasons to hate the colonial forces around them.
The revenge story is brutal, but Kent is interested in something bigger than vengeance. This is a movie about what violence does to people. It’s about colonialism, misogyny, and what happens when the people who are supposed to deliver justice are the same people responsible for the violence.
It's furious, bleak, and sometimes almost unbearably brutal. Unlike the fantasy version of revenge, there is no neat reset button waiting at the end. There is only survival, and whatever you can build from what's left.
10. Born in Flames (1983)
Lizzie Borden's DIY feminist sci-fi film takes place in an alternate United States that has supposedly achieved a socialist utopia. Except racism, sexism and economic inequality are still very much alive and kicking.
Two feminist groups organize through pirate radio. Black, lesbian and working-class women become increasingly radicalized. The movie unfolds through news broadcasts, protests, radio transmissions and guerrilla footage, eventually moving toward something much more explosive. It's: Messy. Political. Angry. It feels less like a traditional movie than somebody hijacked the television station and started broadcasting a revolution.
I close this list with this flick because it feels hopeful that maybe the answer isn't always revenge.
Possibly, it's resistance. It's finding other women, finding your people, and deciding that the world you're being handed isn't good enough. Maybe enough's enough doesn't mean one woman finally fights back. Maybe it means everyone does.
BUY STUFF YOU DON’T NEED. WEAR IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT.