Kill Bill, Promising Young Woman, and Revenge Fantasies

Revenge stories offer a seductive answer to a problem that real institutions often leave unresolved: what happens when women are harmed and nobody with power seems willing to act? In Kill Bill and Promising Young Woman, retaliation becomes a form of fantasy justice, shaped by rage, spectacle and the desire to make violence visible. Both films allow audiences to imagine a woman taking control, yet they also expose the costs of turning liberation into punishment.

For Australian viewers, these stories arrive within a culture increasingly alert to gendered violence. Conversations about consent, coercive control and institutional failure have shifted through the influence of #MeToo, local survivor advocacy and public inquiries. Screen stories can give emotional form to that anger, but they can also simplify the conditions that make revenge feel like the only available route to accountability.

Revenge as a response to institutional failure

Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill begins with a woman whose life has been violently taken from her. The Bride is betrayed, beaten and left for dead, while the people responsible continue moving through the world. Her campaign against them is excessive by design: every sword fight and blood-soaked confrontation turns private trauma into a public spectacle.

The film’s fantasy rests on efficiency. The Bride does not need to persuade a police officer, survive cross-examination or wait years for a court date. She identifies those who harmed her and confronts them directly. That clarity is emotionally powerful because real survivors are often expected to produce perfect evidence, remain composed and accept institutional delays.

Promising Young Woman presents a more recognisable social world of university parties, medical professionals and respectable men. Cassie’s revenge targets a network of people who excuse, minimise or benefit from sexual violence. Her performances as an apparently intoxicated woman expose the confidence with which men assume vulnerability makes someone available. The film’s bright colours and pop soundtrack make that social cruelty feel disturbingly ordinary.

Two different fantasies of female power

The Bride’s power is physical, disciplined and almost mythic. She trains, travels and fights her way through a masculine underworld, mastering the tools traditionally associated with action heroes. Her body becomes an instrument of survival rather than an object for someone else’s desire.

Cassie’s performance is more fragile. She uses hesitation, silence and calculated awkwardness to unsettle men who believe they are rescuing or exploiting her. Her strategy depends on reading social scripts, then turning those scripts back against the people who use them. The threat is psychological before it becomes physical.

That difference matters. Kill Bill imagines revenge as an epic quest with a clear endpoint, while Promising Young Woman treats it as an obsession that reshapes a person’s identity. Cassie is not simply reclaiming her life; she is organising her entire existence around a wound. Her revenge produces moments of control, but it cannot restore the future she lost.

Violence can challenge patriarchy and reproduce it

Both films ask audiences to enjoy violence while recognising its gendered origins. Tarantino’s stylised action gives the heroine the pleasures usually reserved for men: mastery, aggression, spectacle and unapologetic ambition. The Bride is allowed to be frightening without being made narratively disgusting.

Yet Kill Bill also draws heavily on familiar exploitation imagery. Women’s suffering becomes part of a visual vocabulary built from blood, mutilation and sexualised danger. The film gives its heroine agency, but it rarely pauses to examine the broader social structures that make violence routine. Its world is organised around exceptional individuals rather than collective change.

Emerald Fennell’s film is more self-conscious about this contradiction. Cassie’s revenge exposes how “good guys” protect one another, but the story still turns trauma into a stylish package. Its pastel palette, club music and polished production make the violence consumable. That discomfort is central to the film’s meaning: audiences may condemn rape culture while enjoying the fantasy of spectacular retribution.

The limits of who gets to be a revenge hero

These films are also shaped by whose pain mainstream cinema considers commercially legible. The Bride and Cassie are white women whose stories receive elaborate visual treatment, narrative attention and the presumption that their anger deserves an audience. Their whiteness and relative access to social recognition help make their revenge imaginable as a personal story.

That framework leaves important gaps. First Nations women in Australia experience disproportionate levels of violence, disappearance and institutional neglect, yet their stories are far less likely to become glossy revenge thrillers. A feminist reading must ask why some women are granted cinematic complexity while others are reduced to statistics, victims or background figures.

The Australian screen market adds another layer. Films such as these circulate through cinemas, Netflix, Stan, Binge and curated festival programmes, where content warnings and public debate shape how audiences encounter them. In Melbourne and Sydney, feminist film discussions can sit alongside strong activist communities, while viewers in regional areas may have fewer cultural spaces for collective discussion. The same revenge fantasy can feel like catharsis in one setting and an uncomfortable reminder of unequal access to justice in another.

From personal punishment to collective accountability

Revenge fantasies become most revealing when they show what justice cannot repair. The Bride can kill the people who betrayed her, but she cannot erase the years stolen from her or guarantee that another woman will be safe. Cassie can expose a network of complicity, but her plan depends on secrecy, manipulation and sacrifice. Neither story offers a durable social solution.

Australian debates about coercive control make this tension especially relevant. Queensland’s criminalisation of coercive control, commencing in 2025, reflects growing recognition that abuse is often a pattern rather than a single incident. Legal reform can name behaviour that was previously dismissed as a private relationship problem, yet laws remain limited by policing practices, unequal credibility and the realities of leaving an unsafe home.

The strongest lesson in both films is therefore less “women should take revenge” than “a society that withholds justice will produce fantasies of revenge.” These stories give shape to anger, and anger can be politically useful when it points towards prevention, survivor support and institutional reform. It becomes dangerous when punishment is mistaken for healing or when individual retaliation replaces demands for collective responsibility.

Viewers can hold the pleasure and the critique together. Watch the swordplay, the costumes and the dark comedy, then examine whose suffering is being aestheticised and whose is ignored. Share feminist criticism, support survivor-led organisations and keep the conversation focused on changing the conditions that make revenge seem necessary in the first place.