Starring Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz. In English and French, with English subtitles. Rated 18A

The bluntly titled Revenge is about just one thing. Its people are two-dimensional characters acting out primal urges in a nameless place. For her feature debut, French writer-director Coralie Fargeat has come up with something so brutally atavistic, specifics would only get in the way.

Events centre on a woman called Jen. She’s played by Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz—not multiple Scandinavians but just one Italian, speaking English here, if very little of it. Jen might be in show biz. Our first glimpse of her is while she’s descending from a helicopter in Lolita shades with matching lollipop.

The craft has landed on a promontory in the middle of a vast desert (Moroccan, in fact), just by a luxury villa so supermodern it has a giant painting of the Virgin Mary competing with the infinity pool. Jen arrives with a handsome millionaire named Richard (Kevin Janssens), who could be some sort of politician. He’s definitely married, judging from cellphone conversations with someone about table settings at an upcoming dinner party.

Things are okay until Richard’s hunting buddies show up a day early. Do I really need to go on? I mean, “hunting buddies” should be enough, but Jen decides to keep partying with this macho claque. And if that includes wearing next to nothing while dancing around them like a manic sex pixie, they shouldn’t make assumptions. They do, though, and when Richard leaves for a few hours, Fargeat sets in motion a cruel match that’s as much about sexual politics as about survival.

This is where the young filmmaker shows talent for more than bloody provocation and wide-screen geometry: the instigator (Vincent Colombe) turns out to be the least violence-prone of the three; the nonparticipant (Guillaume Bouchède) is a sadist; and the supposed boyfriend is the one who wants her erased from the picture. What follows is a kind of Tomb Raider–meets–Mad Max: Fury Road, with our pussycat heroine reborn as an avenging angel. She even ends up with scars that resemble gothic wings.

The pain comes amid techno music and rapid-fire editing, and some tropes are upended in striking ways. The principal male antagonist, for example, spends the last battle entirely naked. Some viewers will certainly find the whole subject too loaded a topic for even the most kinetic comeuppance. But there’s a case to be made for adrenaline as an antidote to toxic masculinity.