The movie was so emotional, with all the heated argument scenes, and so real: the rain in a family camp scene and landscapes in driving car scenes. Viewers are given too many visual special effects in modern films and series, but movies like “Vengeance Is Mine” give us scenes with genuine emotions and settings: drawings with black eyes, playing piano in the middle of a heated argument: you feel and endless energy and effort of the actors to give their character and everything that is placed in the scene liveliness. Watching this film in the middle of the midterm exams surprisingly relaxes your mind. The movie allows you to escape reality for a couple of hours. You are crying; you are laughing together with the characters. With total immersion in their roles, actors unintentionally expose the audience’s traumas. It seems like actors were chosen not just for their outstanding acting skills but also for their natural facial expressions of sadness and disillusionment with the world. The natural downward smile of Brooke Adams makes everything in the film look even more dramatic. A sad face is the one people usually try to hide. We make everyone think we are happy and careless. Maybe that’s why it is so hard to cope with the modern world. All these contemporary works have nothing in common with old films, which make the past closer to the modern generations and vivid for those whose reckless past was a part of their lives.

The Chicago Film Society screened the film, as directed by Michael Roemer, in the Auditorium at NEIU. “Vengeance Is Mine was not getting [a] proper release until now, and you are among the first who watch the film in the theatrical format,” – mentioned Becca Hall in the middle of her speech before the movie screening. Even the way Hall used small square stickers, which guided her speech, made the atmosphere different from what you typically expect from the presenters. 

This movie is focused on two women with their demons, whose lives are curiously intertwined. Characters learn life lessons by carefully watching and engaging in each other’s personal lives. Jo found her child in a different family, and Donna feels like she is losing her value as a mother. One tries to get away from her abusive husband, and another tries to get closer to her daughter. Jo is destroyed mentally by her unhappy marriage, and her sister lives in peace and harmony with her husband and a newborn. Jo’s mother is cold to her and is much closer to her sister. A scene when Jo begs her husband to drive slower and constantly asks him where he rushes, and a scene when Jo peacefully drives with Tom – Donna’s husband – and Jackie – Donna’s daughter – all the film is about contrasts.

The film makes us question what we look for in a marriage. Do we search for love? Or do we try to find a soulmate, and marriage is the only way we can possess it for life? Or is marriage about getting a certain status? The film shows marriage’s grayest and most real side: “I don’t love you. I just need you.” But why do we need marriage? Maybe we want to dominate; it is about obsession: “I cannot get you out of my mind,” – said Steve, Jo’s husband with whom Jo desperately tries to get a divorce. In that scene, when Steve cuts Jo’s hair, both scream at each other, and then, all of a sudden, Jo rushes out of the car, and Steve leaves her alone with the suitcase. The same situation is with dealing with children in a family. “She is my child,” – said Donna. “But it doesn’t mean to possess!” – argues Jo. 

Sometimes we all like to blame someone else for our faults. We may blame a full moon for crying all day and feeling a bit more depressed than on other days, having a headache because you argue with your son or daughter, or blaming the rain that starts to pour when you are in the middle of your way back home. But the thing is that in all these situations, we are involved personally, and maybe first we should search for a cause of a problem within ourselves “it wasn’t God, it was you” – this phrase from the movie opens eyes to most of our insecurities in life. 

How many things may happen within a short time, and not all the trips result in how you planned – Jo couldn’t expect to get acquainted with the new people at all. At the movie’s beginning, she was drinking and periodically chuckling, but a genuine smile appeared at the end. The characters’ body language tells us a lot and just by looking at their faces, you see the story behind the character. “Vengeance Is Mine” is about something in between the past and the present. It is not only about happiness or sadness. What do we think action films usually look like? Car races, extreme situations characters deal with, chases, something always explodes and so on. The film doesn’t have the genre “action,” but it’s something beyond “drama.” Just by looking at the driving cars scenes, the one when Jo’s husband was driving as he competed in a Formula 1 when he was younger, that was fantastically shot and performed.