Bamboo Revenge had its world première at FrightFest 2025, Monday 25th August
Sometimes all that there is to a film can be found in the title. David R. Ellis’ Snakes on a Plane (2006), Anthony C. Ferrante’s Sharknado (2013) and Elizabeth Baks’ Cocaine Bear (2023) all come with their Unique Selling Point inscribed right upfront in their name – and Edgar Marie’s Bamboo Revenge does something similar, so that the rest of the film feels as though it has been reverse-engineered from that titular high concept. Admittedly its original French title, Mōsō, involves a little more mystification, as the common name of a species of fast-growing bamboo, phyllostachys edulis.
The first images in Bamboo Revenge show a woman being passed over the hands of a crowd at an outdoor rave, her expression gradually shifting from ecstasy to alarm and distress. This is Iris (Sophie Maréchal), and by the time the narrative proper is underway at 1.25pm Sunday afternoon, Iris is already out of the picture, vanished without trace – and it will take a sequence of flashbacks, with plenty of red herrings, to reconstruct what has happened to her.
That is certainly what Iris’ sister Eve (Audrey Pirault) would like to know – and much as Iris was first seen lying supine and wriggling to evade some of the male hands prodding and palpating her in an uninvited, unwelcome manner, now the three men whom Eve suspects of being responsible for Iris’ disappearance the night before – bartender Jules (Constantin Vidal) and his friends Victor (Paul Deby) and Sam (Jimony Ekila) – find themselves in a similar position: lying bound on their backs in a forest clearing, with mōsō that Eve has especially planted beneath them rapidly sprouting and threatening to impale them from below. For Eve is a bamboo expert, and is absolutely determined to get answers from these three men about Iris’ whereabouts, even if it means torturing and killing them, or at least letting nature do it for her.
Not that this is exactly natural justice. For while Eve may be turning the tables on violence against women, letting its purported perpetrators know what it feels like to be non-consensually penetrated, she is not in command of the full picture, and for all the peculiar ingeniousness of her methodology, her targeting is scattergun at best, with plenty of room for horrific collateral damage. In other words, she embodies that old trope of revenge wherein, no matter how righteous her cause may be, she becomes at least as monstrous as those she is punishing, if not much more so.
The biggest problem with Bamboo Revenge is that the particular method of torment adopted by Eve to expel sin from her sylvan Eden proves not particularly cinematic. Despite the variety of camera angles employed, there is something essentially static and inert about the spectacle of men lying and groaning on the ground. The many flashbacks certainly transport the viewer to a more dynamic, more mobile kind of action, but do not tell a particularly interesting story. What they do show, though, is women being casually subjected to multiple modes of unwanted male attention and predation – and the question that the film constantly raises by flipping between an ambiguous set of causes and their brutal consequences, while also showing the workings of the actual law (via Frédéric Clou’s haunted police detective), is whether Eve goes way too far, or not far enough, in her one-woman vendetta. Trying to answer this question – a moral crux – may leave you squirming.
strap: Edgar Marie’s high-concept non-chronological thriller gets to the roots of male predation and female vendetta
© Anton Bitel
