Do Revenge (2022)

Do Revenge arrives with the confidence of a film that has studied its elders closely. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's Netflix comedy borrows its chassis from Strangers on a Train and its wardrobe from every 1990s high school picture that ever put a knife in a locker. Two young women, one dethroned and one newly arrived, agree to ruin each other's enemies. The arrangement goes badly, as arrangements in this genre must.

The film's central engine is a sapphic betrayal at summer camp, and it treats that material with a casual fluency that would have been unthinkable in the era it so lovingly imitates. Eleanor was outed, renamed herself, and returns for restitution. Her later romance with Max's twin sister unfolds without a single speech attached to it. The ensemble is diverse in a manner that never announces itself, which is its own quiet accomplishment. Race is not a topic here. Neither is the body, nor the climate, nor the historical record. What the film does examine is the double standard applied to a young woman whose private video escapes into the world, and the machinery of elite schooling that rewards the right surname. It does all of this through farce, not through a lectern.

There is messaging here, about revenge, about toxic masculinity, about the way institutions protect their preferred sons. It is smuggled in through camp and winking. The closing epilogue, in which the villain is dispatched to a support group for his condition, lands as a moral punchline instead of an argument. We have seen this before. We will see it again. The film knows it, and mostly declines to raise its voice.