Do Revenge

Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke charm each other in Netflix teen thriller 'Do Revenge,' a twinned, twisted tale of doled-out retribution.

Song and film alike ask you to lose yourself in such raw emotion — to excuse, even, the intentionally playful grammar faux-pas in its title and to revel instead, in its ultimately winking moral of a tale. — and where she and Drea can come up with the notion of giving off “Glennergy” (i.e. This is a film where Eleanor can ruefully note that she’s a “Billie Jean King in a sea of Maria Sharapovas” — while reading Highsmith’s novel, no less! And couldn’t Drea stage a hit on that “crunchy lesbian” who, as Eleanor tells is, outed and humiliated a young Eleanor while at summer camp several years prior? After all, Robinson’s project owes less to Hitchock’s infamous classic than to the likes of “Heathers,” “Mean Girls” and “Cruel Intentions” — influences the film wears proudly on its stylish and appropriately throwbacky Y2K-era sleeves. [Jennifer Kaytin Robinson](https://variety.com/t/jennifer-kaytin-robinson/)’s viciously delectable “ [Do Revenge](https://variety.com/t/do-revenge/)” is that it should stand alongside the many iconic teen flicks it both cribs from and pays homage to.

Do Revenge,” Netflix's new high school revenge-swap dramedy starring Maya Hawke and Camilla Mendes, is a minefield of '90s teen movie references — from.

I watched ‘Stranger Things,’ so I knew her work, and when I heard she was already attached, it made me want to be part of the project that much more.” “So I didn’t want the story of Eleanor to be about her being outed; it’s what happened when she was outed.” “But, also, part of what makes actors actors is that they are people who are good at having chemistry with people,” she added. Bonded by their respective traumas and dread about the coming school year, the two eventually hatch a plan to “do revenge” for each other and get away with it. And, on top of that, the emotional depth of the movie — it’s a really beautiful story about healing your trauma.” In fact, the director moved the filming location to Atlanta so that both Hawke and Mendes were able to sign on. “It was really about staying true to the deliciousness of ‘Strangers on a Train,’ within this world that feels really candy-coated, saturated and fun.” In addition to “Strangers on a Train,” Highsmith is perhaps best known for writing “The Talented Mr. A nude video of her is leaked online and the most likely culprit is her boyfriend, Max (Austin Abrams of “Euphoria” fame), who wields significantly more power over the privileged student body than Drea, who attends the school on a scholarship. That’s when, friendless and in risk of losing her chance at Yale, she meets a new transfer, Eleanor, who unlike Drea is no stranger to being a social pariah. And even the soundtrack of pop songs and camera work, which includes montages of school cliques and aerial shots, pay homage to the ‘90s teen genre — as do its central storylines. “Do Revenge,” Netflix’s new high school revenge-swap dramedy starring Maya Hawke and Camila Mendes, is a minefield of ‘90s teen movie references — from cliques with coordinating outfits to makeover schemes and house parties where popularity is made and lost.

"Do Revenge" has all the makings of an attention-generating machine, combining a "Mean Girls" vibe with the stars of two popular teen franchises in Camila ...

She directs her anger at dreamy ex-boyfriend Max (Abrams), who leaked an explicit tape of her, while Hawke's Eleanor has nursed an old grudge against a girl who leveled a false accusation against her in the course of outing her. Mostly, it's a story of unlikely friendship, set against the backdrop of another private school where the parties make Roman bacchanals seem restrained and pale by comparison. Yet the plot (based on a script by Robinson and Celeste Ballard) doesn't pursue that enticing prospect with much conviction, which might explain why it runs out of steam down the stretch.

Do Revenge, with Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke, is too cluttered to service any of its many moving parts, homages, or tones.

The show will feature a very young Ahsoka Tano and her mother Pav-ti (voiced by Janina Gavankar), as well as the return of Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn.](/videos/star-wars-tales-of-the-jedi-official-trailer) [Street Fighter 6 Reveals Its Full Launch Roster2h ago - A mix of new and old - plus your cutomizable creation.](/articles/street-fighter-6-reveals-its-full-launch-roster) [Marvel’s Thunderbolts Roster Isn't Very Electrifying… A big issue here is that things aren't supposed to make all that much sense for a large run of the story because everything's nurturing the aforementioned twist. The film, though, is somewhat lax with this set up since even before Drea and Eleanor meet, Drea outright obliterates the life of someone else who wronged her ( [Game of Thrones](/articles/2019/05/23/game-of-thrones-sn-8-review)' Sophie Turner in brief role), making it seem like she's more than capable of handling her own revenging. It's set at a posh school for the ultra wealthy and asks a great deal of us when it comes to investing in the troubles and turmoils of the preposterously privileged. [Riverdale](/articles/2018/10/11/riverdale-season-3-premiere-review-labor-day-archie-jail)'s Camila Mendes and [Stranger Things](/articles/stranger-things-season-4-part-2-review)' Maya Hawke star as Drea and Eleanor, two seniors who agree to ruin the lives of the others' tormentor.

Director and cowriter Jennifer Kaytin Robinson takes us inside her candy-coated new Netflix film with images of fashion, bearded dragons, and Sophie Turner.

'Riverdale' star Camila Mendes and 'Stranger Things' star Maya Hawke team up for Netflix's high school twist on 'Strangers on a Train,' from director ...

It was just like, “This is just a really cool project and I want to be in it, and like I don’t give a f— that I’m 26 playing in high school. I could see that you were running from a long day on “Stranger Things” to another long day on “Do Revenge,” then back to a long day on “Stranger Things.” The work she put in to both projects simultaneously was so impressive, and the fact that every time she showed up to work I didn’t see the exhaustion. It was a big undertaking and touched a lot of soft spaces in our hearts. Your temperament through all of that was so impressive, and not a lot of people can pull that off. The second I realized that this movie was going to be that, getting to work with amazing people who really care about it, it didn’t matter if I’d be playing a bush or a lamp post or a keychain. Like, “I just love too hard” or, “My tragic flaw is that I care too much!” I don’t think that’s the case with Drea and Eleanor. Every now and then someone has hurt my feelings, and the way they hurt my feelings, I had to be like, “Gosh, you’re so smart. You hurt my feelings in the exact way that my feelings can be hurt.” Sometimes someone does something to you that doesn’t look that bad on the surface, but really hits your soft spot ... And this is credit to Jenn’s writing and directing, to set up a scene where you have two characters you’ve been following and they both have a very strong opinion about what’s happened, and as an audience member, neither one is right and neither one is wrong. But when we’re in the scene of our own lives, we’re like, “No! “I had nothing but time and resources and I had my two co-stars with me and we were all just watching ‘Harry Potter’ movies all week,” she said. I feel like I’ve been Drea at low points in my life, where I’ve been vengeful or I’ve wanted to hurt somebody who hurt me, and I’ve felt motivated by those same dark desires.

From a '10 Things I Hate About You'–inspired paintball date to a 'Cruel' cameo, here's a breakdown of teen movie Easter eggs hidden in plain sight.

Robinson Library, in honor of Do Revenge’s director and co-writer? “All three of us really immersed ourselves in all of these films,” she says. “I feel like coming back to them as a filmmaker, I was just really taken aback about how beautiful these films are.”

Sarah Michelle Gellar and Camila Mendes also star in a candy-coated "Gossip Girl" riff that's major fun despite its try-hard feminism.

If they want to do a little revenge on a world that seems hell bent on driving humanity off a cliff, “Do Revenge” offers some clever entertainment for the ride. The two collaborated on the 2016 MTV comedy “Sweet/Vicious,” a college rape revenge comedy that predated “Promising Young Woman” by a few years. It’s nice to see Robinson and Ballard get another shot at the vigilante genre in “Do Revenge,” though they’ve traded violence for more psychological tortures. [Maya Hawke](https://www.indiewire.com/t/maya-hawke/) (“Stranger Things”) as two unlikely allies in a battle for teen justice, “Do Revenge” is a funny feminist take on the mainstream high school comedy. “I’m Frankenstein, and you’re Frankenstein’s bad bitch.” The plan is to infiltrate Max’s friend group in order to humiliate them and prove once and for all that the founder of the “Cis Hetero Men Championing Women Identifying Students League” is full of shit. If two-faced men’s rights groups and psychedelic mushroom stings seem a little ridiculous, it’s all part of the sickly fun and games of “Do Revenge,” a quippy romp through the steely cunning of that universally feared group: teenage girls.

Hairstylist Katie Ballard on the '90s-inspired aesthetic she crafted alongside the film's stars.

“It’s not a word that I used a lot until this film, but it’s basically just not a hair out of place,” says Ballard, who used “As I sat and chatted with Maya, the references that came up were actually her mom, Uma, and Taylor Swift,” says Ballard of what became “the most interesting part” of designing each character’s style. “If you picture a really slicked, high 40-inch pony, that’s the epitome of the ‘snatched’ look.” A long brunette version that matched her natural hair color during her “awkward” phase in the beginning, and a bright blonde that Ballard notes represents her “coming into her power.” Hawke and Ballard referenced the iconic Pulp Fiction bob that Uma Thurman wore for the latter, but this time in a Swift-level shade of blonde designed by wig artist Robert Miller-Navarre. Directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, Do Revenge reimagines the familiar thrill of a plot-driven makeover scene. In the dark comedy, Hawke plays Eleanor, a wealthy outcast who comes together with Mendes’s character Drea, an insider experiencing a fall from social grace, all at the expense of their prep school enemies.

'Do Revenge,' Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's new Netflix movie starring Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke, takes hints from '90s and '00s classics like 'Clueless,' ...

“I want everyone to have a different feeling of when the characters were right and when they were wrong,” Robinson says of the twist. Because Drea is Latina and a scholarship student, the audience knows the consequences for her could be devastating, and now we’re faced with a dilemma: Have we been rooting for the villain this entire time? “The story could be told with a white person at the center, but it’s not as interesting to me,” she explains, adding, “It wasn’t a coincidence that the three people [taken down by Drea and Eleanor] — Erica, Carissa, and Max — are all white people.” It would have been easy for Robinson to place a non-white protagonist at the center of Do Revenge, ignore the necessity of code switching or feelings of discomfort among elites, and still get credit for adding diversity to her film. In the end, they don’t even have to execute their plan to get revenge on Max. With that one reveal, Drea should go from being the girl you root for to the one you root against. But even as the film benefits from the intoxicating delight of vengeance, it subverts the genre in its final act. Spoiler ahead: About three-fourths of the way through the film, we learn that Drea is not just a victim, she is also a villain. “The difference between Kathryn and Drea is her empathy and heart,” Robinson explains. “The idea of someone making a mistake and trying to make amends was really important to me,” Robinson says. Drea, on the other hand, was raised by a single mother and is one of the few scholarship students at Rosehill Country Day. [high-school enemies](https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/the-most-iconic-queen-bees-in-pop-culture.html) — the purest form of petty wish fulfillment — brings a sense of euphoria for the viewer, and rooting for a bad character’s demise without feeling any guilt is a unique cinematic pleasure. But for Robinson, it was always important that Drea would not have the same level of comfort and safety as her peers.

Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, who co-wrote and directed the film, spoke about the influences behind 'Do Revenge' and how it taps into teenage girl rage.

“I wanted it to elicit a feeling in you,” she says. It was in the very first draft that she wrote,” Robinson says of the term inspired by Glenn Close’s bunny killing turn in Fatal Attraction. “There are definitely some Reputation undertones in the film,” says Robinson, who is a fan of the singer. “That feeling that it hurts to exist starts in those middle school and high school years, but it doesn’t go away. “We really blew it out and wanted it to feel color soaked,” she says. “I heard her say it and was just like, ‘Yeah, Maya, that’s perfect,’” she says. “She really brought so much insight and nuance to the character,” she says. “Cami really created her character visually: the hair, makeup, the snatched wardrobe,” she says. “They’re very tapped in and really understand the demographic,” Robinson says. The Cruel Intentions star plays the movie’s only adult character, a “juicy and fun role” for the former teen queen that was “That came because Netflix told me to cut [the line] ‘that dumb bitch’ and I thought it would be funny to start off the frame with that license plate,” she says. “It was one of those things where it almost immediately clicked,” Robinson tells TIME when recalling the original pitch to adapt the novel.

Sophie Turner screams swear words in Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's "Do Revenge," but Netflix executives were less than thrilled.

George Miller's new movie, a new anime on Netflix, the black comedy Do Revenge, John Boyega's Breaking, and new Channing Tatum and Jon Hamm movies lead the ...

Comedies have fallen out of favor in a cinematic landscape that’s more devoted to Liam Neeson-style revenge movies, but Confess, Fletch is refreshing, not just for how it uses comedy, but for how it uses Jon Hamm. Hiroyasu Ishida’s (Penguin Highway) latest anime feature Drifting Home centers on childhood friends Kosuke and Natsume who, after visiting the apartment building where they used to live before it’s demolished, are transported to another dimension surrounded by a vast ocean. It never feels at odds with the film’s sense of peril when the director inflects broad, sometimes elastic physical comedy on the characters’ interactions with these environments, like when Kosuke daringly uses a makeshift zipwire to reach an adjacent floating building, crashes through the corrugated iron roof, and bounces off the building like a pinball. The remake’s shortcomings aren’t due to her lack of craft or effort — the issues lie solely in the writing and directing. Not only does the remake lack the gumption to even approach the original film in terms of terror and on-screen pain, it doesn’t really work as a film in its own right. Naomi Watts stars in the 2022 American remake of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s 2014 psychological horror film Goodnight Mommy. Eventually, Vengeance starts to feel a bit like a distended meme, tracking the gifted-kid-to-compromised-murder-investigator pipeline. Inspired by a real-life story, Breaking also notably features the late Michael K. Bound to Alithea until he grants three of her wishes, the Djinn tells her three stories from across his three thousand years of captivity, each one recounting a tale of loss, longing, betrayal, and love. But it isn’t derivative or a cliche: Instead, it’s a natural evolution of this type of movie for 2022. We’ve got Three Thousand Years of Longing, George Miller’s highly anticipated follow-up to 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, 2022 thriller-drama Breaking starring John Boyega and the late Michael K. This weekend sees the debut of Netflix’s teenage black comedy film Do Revenge starring Camila Mendes (Riverdale), Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones).

Barring the odd slip up into mediocrity, Do Revenge provides an intelligent modern twist to Hitchcock's age-old classic idea of two strangers meeting and ...

And once you have the characters nailed down, the rest of the job gets easier because they are the ones who show you the way ahead. It is emotionally engaging to hear them talk because the dialogue is not generic and tacky. Despite all of its changes from the ordinary teen movie formula, Do Revenge never loses its peppy vibe that makes these genre films so easy to watch. The thought process probably was to use it in making the story more inclusive, and multi-dimensional, and to appease certain factions of the audience. Drea and Eleanor are so fun to hear at times that you would be tempted to roll back the seconds and go at it again. Most of it is finetuned to fit the billing. They want revenge and decide to help each other by taking it out on the other person’s respective target. A lot of attention is given to their arches, carefully constructed within the plot itself. The age-old problem with such films is the lack of good writing and depth. She punches Max (Austin Abrams), who is a big deal with a rich father, in front of the entire school, getting a temporary suspension. They get to talking and discover that each carries a fresh wound in their hearts. At the camp, she meets Eleanor (Maya Hawke), a mostly reserved, straightforward girl, who is joining Drea’s school Rosehill, in a few months.

The Do Revenge Twitter review starring Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke will give the movie a much-needed boost. The film apprises Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers ...

[Drea](/topic/drea)and [Eleanor](/topic/eleanor). [Maya Hawke](/topic/maya-hawke)and [Camila Mendes](/topic/camila-mendes). The film's synopsis reads that after a covert bust-up, following a leaked sex tape of Drea (Camila Mandes) by her boyfriend and Eleanor (Maya Hawke), outcasted for a rumor of kissing a girl, they form a team to go after each other's oppressors. Indian equities tumbled close to 2% on Friday, tracking weakness in global markets, as stronger-than-expected economic readings in the US raised expectations of aggressive rate increases by the American central bank at next week’s policy meeting. What most awe-struck the fans were the amusing one-liner and clever plot and the pompous characters of Most fans were impressed with the eminence of the characters and the movie's storyline.

"Thor: Love and Thunder" co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson revealed how she approached "Do Revenge" differently than a Marvel movie.

“Tell me what you think: I think the sequel should be ‘Deux Revenge’ and it’s about Sophie Turner coming for Drea and Eleanor.” “It’d be fun to see Drea and Eleanor do a road trip movie,” Hawke teased. That is what I like the most and so if that comes in the form of a $200 million Marvel movie, awesome. “I would love to direct a big movie like Marvel or DC, but I think for me, it’s about the stories that I connect to,” Robinson told IndieWire. If that comes in the form of a $5 million Blumhouse movie, also awesome. The ensemble cast including Austin Abrams, Sophie Turner, Ava Capri, Maia Reficco, Paris Berelc, Talia Ryder, Jonathan Daviss, Rish Shah, and Alisha Boe, even dubbed themselves the “Revengers” with a special nod to Marvel’s “Avengers.”

22 details you probably missed in 'Do Revenge,' Netflix's new teen movie starring Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke · There's a clip of Drea talking about positivity ...

](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139134/) ](https://www.insider.com/mean-girls-cool-details-you-never-got) [Taylor Swift's](https://www.insider.com/taylor-swift-gay-songs-queer-lyrics-2022-9), ["Look What You Made Me Do." "It was less about the name-iness of the artists or the songs, and it was way more about, does the song bring you back to a time?" [In the book](https://www.insider.com/love-and-gelato-differences-book-vs-movie-netflix-2022-6), two strangers agree to commit murders for one another, which is similar to Eleanor and Drea's plot to "do each other's revenge." In the "Do Revenge" scene, Carissa is wearing Birkenstocks, which is also a callback to Drea calling Carissa a "human Birkenstock." ](https://www.insider.com/heathers-movie-cast-then-and-now-2018-1) The headlines include "Math: Do We Need It?" ["Clueless,"](https://www.insider.com/cool-fun-facts-you-didnt-know-about-clueless-trivia) The Muff's pop-punk cover of Kim Wilde's "Kids of America" plays as Cher drives around in her Jeep and shops. ["Barbie Girl"](https://genius.com/Aqua-barbie-girl-lyrics) by Aqua. ["Clueless"](https://www.insider.com/clueless-interesting-details-you-missed-fun-facts) and later 2000s teen flicks like ["Mean Girls." ["Strangers on a Train"](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25622296-strangers-on-a-train) during tennis camp.