Starring Siren Jørgensen. In Norwegian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

A woman shows up in a picturesque village in Norway looking for retribution. She can’t do it, at least not with the big knife she brought along. Her intended victim, Morten (Frode Winther), is a recently relocated city dude, highly respected, and a new father, so Rebekka (Siren Jørgensen) splits the difference and goes about ruining his life instead. The pleasure we derive from his undoing—effected through a resourceful form of entrapment involving a friend’s teenage daughter—is what makes Hevn so compulsively watchable.

Rape-revenge movies have a long and dubious history. It’s no I Spit on Your Grave, but Hevn is typical in its reliance on very unlikely plot contrivances, which we’re asked to tolerate because of the moral force of its theme. To this end, credit goes to the blandly good-looking Winther as Rebekka’s quietly self-satisfied mark, a cross between David Beckham and Garret Dillahunt who’s as easy on the eyes as he is to dislike, even if we’re not sure of his guilt. Writer-director Kjersti Steinsbø milks that all the way to a Dragon Tattoo finish that really plays on our less enlightened impulses, not to mention the extra charge we feel when a set of cock and balls is made to look extremely vulnerable.

Horror junk aside, Hevn is an otherwise crisply shot number full of clean Scandinavian lines and a kind of formal simplicity that too readily reveals its narrative shortcomings. But, God, those mountains! It’s like they were shot by John Fjord, zing!