Review: Prevenge

Prevenge (15)

UK 2016 87 mins Dir: Alice Lowe Cast: Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, Dan Renton Skinner, Tom Davis

“I think nature’s a bit of a cunt,” observes the world’s least yummy mummy in Alice Lowe’s deliciously dark debut as writer/director/star, which skewers infantilising pregnancy propaganda and will no doubt come as considerable cathartic relief to gestating women who fail to conform to cultural expectations of serene radiance.

Heavily pregnant herself, Lowe plays Ruth, who feels she’s enduring a hostile takeover. This isn’t helped by her relentlessly jolly midwife (Hartley), who’s afflicted by that annoying habit of referring to herself in the third person and reducing everyone in her professional orbit to ‘mummy’ and ‘baby’. “You have absolutely no control over your mind and body anymore,” she chirps happily, making it hard not to be reminded of Dawn French’s grotesque Joy Aston in Psychoville. Trouble is, this seems to be literally true. Ruth’s misanthropic foetus speaks to her directly in a creepy high-pitched voice, egging her on to murder people.

Some of them clearly deserve to die. A leering pet shop owner (Skinner) is dispatched in a most satisfying manner, surrounded by his imprisoned beasts. Next up is Disco Dan (Davis), a misogynistic middle-aged DJ who sports an afro wig and pumps out ’70s disco to an empty pub. When Ruth gets him drunk, sleazy Dan presumptuously lays out the ground rules: while he’s up for a legover, he’s too young to get tied down in a relationship. “I fuckin’ love fat birds,” he tells her gallantly. “You don’t mind what people do to you.” Alas, ‘baby’ doesn’t appear to be too discriminating and it’s not long before nice, decent people start to die too, underlining the fact that Prevenge is no straightforward feminist revenge horror. “People think babies are sweet, but I’m bitter,” gurgles the squeaky, womb-dwelling psycho as it becomes clear that some other kind of hitlist is at play here.

Thanks to its unpolished low-budget nature and a third act that doesn’t quite live up to the promise of what comes before, Prevenge is no knocked-up knockout. But it wins an awful lot of brownie points for the sheer glee with which the then seven months pregnant Lowe hurls herself into all the bloodletting, as well her imaginative use of Toydrum’s striking synthy score (available on Bristol’s Invada Records). You can read this as a thematic continuation of Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers (which Lowe co-wrote and co-starred in) or a splattery body horror treatise on pre-natal depression, or simply wallow in the gore and thrillingly transgressive trashing of the supposed joys of pregnancy. Whatever you decide, it’s undeniably bloody good fun.