Lucky

May has a problem. Every night, a man comes to her house and tries to kill her and her husband. Every night, they fight the intruder off, kill him, wait for the body to disappear, call the cops, and have breakfast. When she asks her husband about what's happening, his answer is simple: that's the man who comes to kill them every night. And every night, they kill him, and every night he comes back. It's just this thing they deal with now, he explains.

That he is so matter-of-fact about it, like he's remembering to add milk to the grocery list, is an indicator of the quietly bizarre plight of May, played by Brea Grant. The dapper slasher (Smith) that invades her home is just one of those things you deal with. Although, it's mainly May dealing with it, it's just spilling over into everyone else's life, and they're OK with it because it's all part of that thing that happened to her, the one we don't talk about because that's May's business, and she's definitely not interested in talking about it.

Lucky is not simply not a rape-revenge film. It's a brutal, brilliant rebuttal to the idea of a fit of cathartic violence. It's arguably closest to an early, ugly landmark of the genre, The Last House on the Left, because this isn't about fixing anything. Much as Wes Craven finished his film with nothing more than a pile of bodies and two desperate, broken parents, Lucky doesn't let the audience off any hooks. Grant (who also wrote the script) and director Natasha Kermani haven't just created a powerful tool for women to explain what it's like to live with the perpetual threat of male violence: Lucky is a gripping, shocking, ridiculous and cunning look at what it's like to live with complex PTSD, told through a story that is as much sly satire as it is daring metaphor. In her follow up to the more lightly lyrical Imitation Girl, Kermani balances both undoubted fear with an absurdist, Kafka-esque layer of comedy. The off-kilter sensation is re-enforced by Jeremy Zuckerman's score and Michelle Vezilj's soundtrack, a dissonant buzz that feels like living inside a Laurie Anderson experiment.

And Lucky makes absolutely the right choice by having Grant taking the lead in her own script. It was inspired by her own issues with dealing with a stalker, but she catches the universality of the experience - and also that May is utterly on her own. Moreover, without the cheap fix of killing the villain having any impact, Lucky is able to deliver a gut punch of a resolution. Much as with Mandy, the surly anti-heroine of Grant's script for seething blue collar comedy 12 Hour Shift, May isn't a character meant to win audiences over. Some of her actions are, on the surface, deeply off-putting, and there's a deliberate cognitive dissonance between her day job as an author of self-help books and her persistent night time peril. Yet instead of justifying her response, Grant lays down a challenge to the viewer: let's see you do better.

Lucky is available on Shudder now.