Revanche
Revanche
Ex-con Alex plans to flee to the South with his girl after a robbery. But something terrible happens and revenge seems inevitable.
CrossCutCritic reviewedMay 19, 2025
Revanche
To You, Who Mistook the Ache for a Target
> “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
— Genesis 50:20
---
I. To You, Who Thought Justice Would Silence the Grief
You didn’t want forgiveness.
You wanted blood.
You wanted someone else to feel it—
the weight in your chest,
the silence in your bed,
the memory that wouldn’t let you breathe.
So you made a plan.
Careful. Clean. Quiet.
An eye for an eye.
A life for the one taken from you.
You weren’t a monster.
You were just broken,
and trying to break something else in the hope it would unbreak you.
This is your story.
Revanche doesn’t begin in righteousness.
It begins in ache.
In the concrete hum of Vienna’s underworld.
In the arms of a woman paid to love you
and a system designed to keep you small.
Tamara was going to be your future.
But futures, in this world, don’t belong to people like you.
She died in your arms,
and no one paid for it.
So you made someone pay.
You went to the countryside with a gun and a plan.
You watched. Waited.
Stared through your scope at a man with a child’s eyes and a cop’s uniform.
You thought that killing him would even the score.
But what Revanche knows—what grief always knows before we do—
is that revenge doesn’t balance anything.
It just gives the wound a new name.
If you’ve ever wanted someone else to feel what you couldn’t carry—
if you’ve ever confused your longing with justice—
then you already know this ache.
And you already know
that it doesn’t go away
just because someone else begins to suffer.
---
II. The Plan That Couldn’t Heal
It was supposed to be clean.
One shot. One man.
And something inside you would release.
But you hesitated.
Not out of mercy.
Out of memory.
Because when you saw him—
not as a badge, not as a target,
but as a man—
the rage trembled.
And then the plan unraveled.
Not in gunfire, but in quiet.
The lake. The trees. The weight of waiting.
Day after day, the impulse to act became the burden of not acting.
The revenge you rehearsed began to rot in your chest.
And there he was.
The man you meant to kill.
Feeding chickens. Fixing fences.
Grieving.
Yes, grieving.
Not for you. Not even for her.
But grieving something—
somewhere deep and silent that mirrored your own.
That was the first mercy:
He was already carrying what you meant to make him feel.
And in that realization,
your plan began to die.
Not all at once.
Not with a confession or a sermon.
But with the slow erosion that comes
when you see the one you hate
and realize he’s just as broken as you.
If you’ve ever waited for vengeance to satisfy you—
and found only silence—
then you know this moment.
The cross always undoes the sword.
But it does so slowly.
Inwardly.
One cracked illusion at a time.
---
III. The Woman Who Received the Wound and Turned It Into Life
She should not be in this story.
She didn’t pull the trigger.
She didn’t love Tamara.
She didn’t choose any of this.
And yet—
she stands in the center of what remains.
Susanne, the officer’s wife.
The woman whose husband fired the shot,
whose arms receive the man who meant to kill him,
whose body—quietly, defiantly—converts grief into grace.
She does not preach.
She doesn’t cry much.
She simply acts.
She offers Alex work.
Bread. Conversation.
A moment in a kitchen that could almost feel like forgiveness
if either of them could name it.
And then, she offers more.
Not as romance.
Not even fully as desire.
But as a strange, sorrowful benediction.
She receives Alex’s body.
Not to comfort him.
Not to betray her husband.
But to plant something
that will grow
where violence once stood.
She becomes the field.
The place where vengeance dies
and new life takes root.
She knows her husband cannot father a child.
She knows what Alex has carried in his chest.
She receives it all—knowingly. Willingly.
And through that painful exchange,
she gives them both a future
they could never have claimed on their own.
If you’ve ever carried someone else’s wound
and turned it into something living—
something that might bless the very ones who caused it—
then you already know this woman.
She is not the hero.
She is the vessel.
And the cross always needs a vessel.
---
IV. The Confession That Came Without Words
He never says it.
Never confesses.
Never cries.
But when Robert—the man he meant to kill—
tells him about the shooting,
about the woman who died,
about the guilt he carries and cannot name—
Alex listens.
And in that silence,
everything is spoken.
Because Robert doesn’t know who he’s talking to.
But Alex does.
And so does God.
This is not catharsis.
There is no reckoning, no vindication.
Only two men,
bound by a bullet,
mourning the same woman from opposite sides of the cross.
One pulled the trigger.
The other loaded the gun.
Neither meant for her to die.
And both know that doesn’t matter.
So they share something older than justice.
They share grief.
And underneath that—culpability.
Each was a cause.
Each was a victim.
And now, each becomes a father.
If you’ve ever seen your enemy’s face and found it indistinguishable from your own—
if you’ve ever carried a sin so quietly that even your confession came through someone else’s mouth—
then you already know this moment.
It is not resolution.
It is revelation.
And it breaks you cleanly, like light through stained glass.
---
V. The Grace That Undid the Bullet
It should have ended with death.
With vengeance.
With one man buried and the other walking away,
emptied and alone.
But grace has a different rhythm.
And it always arrives offbeat.
Alex never pulls the trigger.
But what he plants—quietly, anonymously, inside the wife of the man he hated—
grows anyway.
A child.
Not his. Not exactly.
Not Robert’s either.
But somehow—both of theirs.
Because in that child lives the consequence and the conversion.
The grief and the gift.
The wound and the healing.
This is not a happy ending.
It is a cruciform one.
Because nothing is fixed.
Tamara is still gone.
The guilt is still shared.
The silence still stretches between them.
But something has entered that silence.
Something living.
And that life—unsought, uninvited, and undeserved—
redeems them both.
Alex will not raise the child.
Robert may never know the truth.
Susanne carries it all, like Mary at the foot of the cross:
the sorrow, the secret, the seed of resurrection.
If you’ve ever watched your failure become someone else’s salvation—
if you’ve ever let go of justice and received something softer in return—
then you know this grace.
It doesn’t erase what happened.
It rewrites what happens next.
---
Postscript
Grace does not always come dressed in light.
Sometimes it comes as a bullet that missed.
A child not planned.
A silence that stretched long enough for mercy to arrive.
Revanche is not a story of justice.
It is a story of grief transfigured.
Of vengeance interrupted.
Of two men who share a wound so deep
they must let a child carry their hope forward.
The cross is never obvious.
But it always leaves something behind.
A life.
A silence.
A grace that didn’t have to happen—
but did anyway.