Julia (3 Stars)

This is yet another Blu-ray that I picked up from DM's bargain bin. (The others were "Asylum" and "Fight Valley"). The first thing that attracted me to the film was the 18 certificate. In Germany film ratings are more lenient than England and America, so the 18 certificate is rare. I picked up the box, and the description said that it's a violent film about a woman taking revenge on men who've raped her. Perfect! I love rape'n'revenge films. It was worth the four Euros that I paid at the checkout, especially since the film costs 15 Euros at Amazon.

The film begins with Julia visiting a man at home. Is it a blind date? That's foolish. The man drugs her drink, and when she wakes up she's raped by four men. What I liked is that the rape itself was skipped over and only shown in brief flashbacks later in the film. When it comes to rape'n'revenge films I don't like the rape to be shown explicitly. The men think she's dead and tell one of them to dump her body in the Hudson River, but she opens her eyes and the man leaves her at the riverside.

Julia doesn't go to the police. She reads online that the police usually doubt the woman and think that the sex was consensual. She takes a week off work and drinks a lot of vodka. Then she overhears women in a bar talking about self help for rape victims. She visits a therapist, a man who recommends that women take revenge on rapists. That's a strange form of therapy! Julia joins a group of women who practise violence against men. They go to bars, and if a man follows one of them into the street the others jump on him and beat him up.

It doesn't stay with beatings. Julia joins the women in murdering rapists, presumably the men who'd raped the others. She begins to enjoy killing. Things are going too slow for her. She wants to pursue her own rapists, so she acts alone. She lures three of them into an apartment, saying that she enjoyed what they'd done to her. She kills them, and then goes to visit the fourth, but he's already been killed.

If the film had ended at this point I would have said "What a great film!" and slapped a five star rating on it. But the film carries on and it gets weird. The so-called therapist is angry that Julia has acted by herself and wants to punish her. To be precise, he wants to execute her for going against his instructions. Why couldn't the writer/director have left it as a standard, predictable rape'n'revenge drama? Why did he have to add an unexpected plot twist? He's spoilt a film that could have been so good.

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