In short: A Vigilante (2018)

A woman we will eventually learn is called Sadie (Olivia Wilde), is helping victims – mostly women of course - of domestic violence to escape the supposed loved ones who abuse them, or, depending on the situation, to drive the abusers off. She’s working with violence, planning, and an anger barely held in check. Sadie’s just holding onto her sanity, apparently, but ironically, her personal brand of vigilantism is what’s holding her together and not what’s tearing her apart.

In flashbacks to support group sessions in a women’s shelter, we eventually learn Sadie’s own story of abuse, something that isn’t quite over yet in the film’s present timeline.

Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s is a master class on how to make what is certainly still a genre film (screw the use of “elevated genre” for what’s actually “really great genre”) about domestic abuse and vigilantism without ever falling into the easy trap of exploiting its theme. In part, this is because of the film’s very careful framing, the way it focuses not on the violence committed on the victims of abuse nor very much on that Sadie inflicts on the abusers in turn, but on the aftermath of both. Like any vigilante film, the film accepts the freeing aspects of what Sadie does - and it’s clear that what she’s doing may be illegal, but it’s also moral and the only thing she can do to stay sane and a person – but it lacks the smug self-satisfaction of most vigilante films, the speechifying, the pretence that this shit is easy. It is also a film much more interested in Sadie helping free these women (and a child) from their horrible situations than in her punishing the perpetrators, and it’s just as interested in a believable portrayal of the psychology of the victims of abuse. That it in the end does finish on an act of vengeance presented in a short series of very classically styled suspense scenes doesn’t actually work against this interest; it is simply the only way for the film to give Sadie some of the peace she desperately deserves, and after having seen what she has been going through, it would be a wrong note to end on to deny her this.

On a more technical level, Daggar-Nickson’s direction impresses through her elegant and meaningful handling of the film’s flashback structure (something that’s too often used as a gimmick), the way she integrates the support group scenes with Sadie’s brand of vigilantism, one part commenting on the other in actually enlightening ways that left this viewer at least understanding more about these characters and the world we live in.


I probably shouldn’t end without mentioning Olivia Wilde’s fantastic performance as Sadie that for large parts of the film works via body language and nuance more than dialogue and huge, dramatic expression. Well, there’s that one big breakdown meant to make clear to the audience how broken she is I found a bit too loud/too much for the rest of the film, but for the most part, we learn all there is to learn about what’s going on with her through glances, posture, the shifting of shoulders and the way her back straightens when she goes out to help someone.