Tattoo of Revenge is a 2019 thriller about a woman in a city where men go unpunished, avenging those who can’t defend themselves.
Let’s get the comparisons with The Girl With Dragon Tattoo right out of the way, the producers of director Julián Hernández‘s Spanish-language film Tattoo of Revenge (Original: Rencor tatuado) not for a moment shying away from that very connection. With that in the open, there’s still plenty different, this centering on a fierce woman named Aída Cisneros (Diana Lein) on a mission for justice, kicking things off by seducing a pudgy older man with money before drugging him, tying to the bed, and then branding him with a massive scorpion tattoo over his genitals and bulbous gut. It’s painful work. We then learn that this is what she does, working from the back of club as clients come looking for her help.
Any conversation about all this though begins with Lien, who is a powerful presence, dressed in black leather, hair tied back in braids. She is a lean, sinewy woman who gives Aída angular ferocity, whether disguised and wooing victims or taking in clients, wary of a setup or a woman with the wrong motivations. She makes Aída a kind of comic book superhero, big and bold, hard-edged and a little off balance. That means she gets right in your face. It’s a good choice, the decidedly heavy themes given a bit of black comedy, though to be sure, this is all taken seriously. After all, nearly all the men here are very bad, and Aída is not having any of it. But who is she really, the woman people know with that name once a famous artist thought to be dead.
Shot primarily in black & white and presented like we’re watching it all through a single frame in a slide show, Hernández isn’t lacking for style, the small production keeping a lot of plates spinning. His slow calculated zooms, tilted cameras, subtle reflections, tracking and lighting, and more give almost every moment of this a sensuous weight, not a bit of it wasted or overdone. Flashbacks, which are brief, arrive in muted color, as is anything seen on television, contrasting nicely with the deep shadows and stark whites of the rest of the film, flipping the sensibility that the past is without detail. It’s a nice touch. That leaves Tattoo of Revenge sometimes raw, laced in fantasy, but mostly artsy with some beautiful imagery that proves Hernández – who has been making movies since the early 90s – is no slouch. This is not just good looking, it’s smart.
However, at over two and half hours, and spun almost entirely around extended dialogue, Tattoo of Revenge, will be, for most audiences, quite a handful as the action is at best, limited. Momentum is structured around investigation running parallel with the titular revenge but this is not a beat ’em up in any sense. Furthermore, Hernández doesn’t miss an opportunity to layer in more dramatic flair, and while that extends this a little beyond the conventional, it still makes for a truly visceral experience. Well worth exploring if you’re a fan of dark mysteries and foreign language films.
Tattoo of Revenge releases on September 17.