WME Signs ‘Revenge’ Helmer Coralie Fargeat: Toronto

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed Coralie Fargeat, hot on the heels of the Toronto Midnight Madness premiere of her vengeance thriller Revenge. Pic stars Matilda Lutz. This was the pic that caused a commotion mid-screening when an audience member was escorted out by ambulance due to a seizure that occurred during one of the film’s most upsetting and graphic and bloody scenes. Fargeat continues to be repped in France by Rosalie Cimino of UBBA. Pic sold to Shudder before its premiere.

Aside from Mary Lambert’s unsparing adaptation of the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary, and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, you can count the number of regularly working female genre filmmakers on the fingers of a hooked-handed villain, especially those capable of creating the need to summon paramedics for audience members. Because of that, Fargeat is already being considered one of the director discoveries of the festival, a strong female voice in a genre where there are few.

Born and raised in Paris, France, Fargeat studied at the prestigious French cinema school Le Fémis, where she befriended another strong female voice in French cinema, Julia Ducournau (Raw). Coralie is also a graduate of the well-known school Sciences Po’ Paris in 1998. Her debut short, The Telegram, won 13 awards at multiple film festivals, and her sci-fi short follow-up, Reality, did the same. Revenge is her first feature film, one that will have its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest before an early 2018 theatrical release by Shudder.

In Revenge, three wealthy, married family men get together for their annual hunting game in a desert canyon. But this time, one of them has brought with him his young mistress (Lutz), a sexy Lolita-esque beauty who quickly arouses the interest of the two others. Things get progressively out of hand and the young woman is left for dead in the middle of a desert hell. She doesn’t die, and when she returns, the hunting game turns into a ruthless manhunt.