Bound to Vengeance is a throwback revenge thriller with a particularly nasty streak. Eve is a young woman who finally finds a way to break free from her captor and escape. When she tries to find the keys for the van, she discovers a huge file of Polaroids of other young women, just like her, captured and chained up by the man she knocked out and chained in her place. Now she’s on a quest to free all the victims and force her tormentor to watch.

What’s so brutal? The rescues never go as planned. We don’t know how long the girls have been chained up, what their lives are like, and if they can even trust a stranger with a gun enough to take them to freedom. Director José Manuel Cravioto and screenwriter Rock Shaink Jr. make it very clear there cannot be a real happily ever after when dealing with victims of prolonged abuse in this story.

Tina Ivlev is largely the reason to watch Bound to Vengeance. She gives an excellence, nuanced performance as Eve. There isn’t a lot of text to work with, so much of the character’s journey from happy woman to victim to avenger is told through reaction and physicality. She might have more lines of dialogue in the scattered flashback sequences showing her last day of freedom than she does in the rest of the film. It’s not a lot to base a character off of, let alone lead the viewer to empathize with the leading lady in a film. Ivlev does so much with so little. She really drags you through a very dark and brutal exploitation film and makes you want to keep watching.

Adriana Serrano and Tim Stuart, the production designer and art director, craft a wide range of disturbing makeshift prisons for the victims. Each woman is trapped in her own personal hell, deprived of some combination of light, sound, space, movement, and comfort. Eve is chained to the floor, but has a mattress and room to move if she chooses. Nina, another victim, is kept in a cage where she couldn’t even turn around if she wanted to.

The cells are each located in different buildings in different neighborhoods surrounding an unidentified city in the background. Each building has its own unique character, contrasting the conditions the victims are held in. It’s a level of detail all too often forgotten in horror films that goes a long way to break up the monotony of the cruel imprisonment and cinematic confinement with the captor.

Bound to Vengeance is well made. It does what it sets out to do. It’s just a particularly repellent blend of storytelling elements that left me unfulfilled. The only compelling arc in the film is Eve’s character transformation and that’s not enough to justify all the outrageous violence and abuse of women lingered on for so long.

Bound to Vengeance is available to rent or purchase on all digital platforms.

***

Sketching Details is now on Patreon. Join for as little as $1 a month for access to exclusive weekly articles.