Prevenge (2016)

Alice Lowe directs and stars in this riotous tale of a pregnant serial killer, hellbent on revenge.
“Kids today are spoiled, it’s like ‘mummy, I want a PlayStation; mummy, I want you to kill that man.’” Ruth is pregnant and full of murderous fury. Cloaked in ordinariness and with a sinister internal dialogue impelling her on, our highly cynical anti-heroine has a shape-shifting personality and a moral compass that’s gone AWOL. Alice Lowe’s directorial debut starts as a dark comedy, and just keeps getting darker. Like Sightseers, which Lowe co-scripted and starred in, the film has an exhilarating sense of tonal incongruity, constantly wrong-footing any of its characters foolish enough to underestimate the seemingly dour Ruth’s capacity for extreme behaviour. Directed and performed when Lowe herself was seven months pregnant, a state rarely presented onscreen by those actually experiencing it, Prevenge offers an insight – albeit a severe one – that goes far beyond hormonal havoc. What not to expect when you’re expecting.
2016 United Kingdom
Directed by
Alice Lowe
Produced by
Vaughan Sivell, Jennifer Handorf, Will Kane
Written by
Alice Lowe
Featuring
Alice Lowe, Dan Renton Skinner, Jo Hartley
Running time
87 minutes