Film of the Week

It's Star Trek, of course, but everyone already knows that that's a mostly rockin' reboot of the venerable sci fi series, whose main debit is too many convenient plot turns.
The same complaint can be made about Revanche, the Oscar-nominated Austrian thriller that opened at the Nuart this weekend. Except that its writer-director, Gotz Spielmann, uses coincidence as a kind of fateful key to exploring moral and emotional subtleties, not just to goose the action along.
Smalltime loser Alex (Johannes Krisch), in love with a Ukrainian prostitute (Irina Potapenko), cooks up a "foolproof" bank heist to get them out of their dead-end Vienna lives and, hopefully, to Ibiza. It almost goes off without a hitch - except there's one big one.
This forces Alex to lay low at his cranky grandfather's farm, which just happens to be situated next to the property owned by the village cop, Robert (Andreas Lust), who tried to stop the bank job. Eaten up with remorse about how it all played out, Robert grows distant from his friendly, church-going, desperate-to-have-a-baby wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss). She's already in the habit of stopping by the farm to look in on the old man, and can't help but notice Alex obsessively -and impressively - chopping firewood to work off his angst.
However contrived things get, Spielmann and his superb ensemble keep the resulting behavior and its implications so fresh and fascinating that this sex-charged suspenser quite convincingly evolves into an almost spiritual story. Guilt, deception and vengeance fuel much of the action, but growth, connection and taking very personal kinds of responsibility become possibilities that may just save all of these flawed and floundering characters from self-willed destruction.Gritty yet pristinely shot, unblinking toward life's ugliness yet meditative as to its possibilities, Revanche is hardly the kind of expertly tuned thrill ride Star Trek so satisfyingly is.
It runs at a to a much slower, contemplative rhythm. But it's better engineered for the kind of thing it is, and even more exciting in its insight into the soul.