Compulsus: Vengeance, Thy Name Is Woman

By Chris Knight

Rating: B-

Compulsus is a revenge thriller with a twist. No, make that two twists. First, the protagonist is female. Mind you, we’ve seen that before, in (among others) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Promising Young Woman, and the aptly named 2017 film Revenge.

But second, the avenger in question is not out to settle any personal score. Although she is by her own somewhat flippant admission a “man-hating lesbian,” Wally (Lesley Smith) has never had a bad relationship or even a bad date with a man. But when she gets together with her straight female pals, she hears stories. And they make her mad. Mad as hell. And she’s not going to take it anymore.

And so, Wally becomes a one-woman retribution squad, doling out harsh physical punishment to all the bad men in her corner of the city. And when she runs out of obvious candidates, she puts up posters with an anonymous email address where women can send names. Business is brisk.

The film is writer-director Tara Thorne’s debut feature, and it’s strong for as far as it goes. Intriguingly, she has all the male victims played by the same faceless, be-hoodied guy (James MacLean), even going so far as to bleep out their names, which did take me out of the film a little when it first happened.

But she also chooses not to show the attacks in any close detail, which I suspected may have been due to budgetary constraints rather than artistic choice. The Bad Men, when they get their comeuppance, mostly stagger and fall in bloodless bundles. It does rob the film of some of the visceral weight of its violence.

Mind you, there’s still a lot going on. Even as Wally is stalking and clocking her prey, she’s also falling for Lou (Kathleen Dorian), a courthouse stenographer whose day job gives her a preternatural sense of when people are lying. Wally can’t keep her Dark Knight proclivities secret for long.

Unfortunately, the relationship is where the film starts to fray. After initialling dumping Wally after just one date, Lou quickly changes her mind, circles back, and becomes entwined in Wally’s life, even as she tries to pull her into the light — half-heartedly and ineffectually, it must be said.

“This feels foolhardy” is one of her early arguments against beating up men in the streets. But later she decides to obtain a gun for her girlfriend, even as she spends every second scene exhorting her to stop. She’s written as being drawn to Wally’s dark side, but the performance doesn’t quite ring true. And her flip-flops between being an enabler and arguing that Wally is going to end up in jail or dead feel more narratively convenient than emotionally realistic.

It’s still a strong debut, and I’d be curious to see what Thorne gets up to next. Apparently, she already has a second feature, an ensemble comedy called Lakeview, which premiered at the Atlantic film festival in Halifax last month. Stay tuned.

Compulsus. Directed by Tara Thorne. Starring Lesley Smith and Kathleen Dorian. In theatres October 11 and on demand November 12.