Find Movies & TV
Home
Live TV
On Demand
Discover
Explore
Movies & TV Shows
Most Popular
Leaving Soon
Categories
Action
Animation
Comedy
Crime
Descriptive Audio
Documentary
Drama
En Español
Horror
Music
Romance
Sci-Fi
Thriller
Western
Explore
Browse Channels
Featured Channels
Stargate by MGM
Hallmark Movies & More
The First 48 by A&E
Categories
Hit TV
Drama TV
True Crime
Comedy
News
Sports
Reality
History & Science
Movies
Sci-Fi & Action
Classic TV
Food & Home
Lifestyle
Nature & Travel
Daytime TV
Game Shows
Kids & Family
Anime+
Chills & Thrills
International
En Español
Music
Sign In
Revanche
Directed by
Götz Spielmann
Not Rated
2008
2h 1m
Crime
,
Drama
,
and more
7.5
96%
83%
Add to Watchlist
Ex-con Alex plans to flee to the South with his girl after a robbery. But something terrible happens and revenge seems inevitable.
More
Where to Watch Revanche
Criterion Channel
Subscription
HBO Max
Subscription
Amazon Video
Rent $3.59
Buy $19.99
Cast of Revanche
Johannes Krisch
Alex
Irina Potapenko
Tamara
Michael-Joachim Heiss
Tagportier
Andreas Lust
Robert
Hanno Pöschl
Konecny
Ursula Strauss
Susanne
Johannes Thanheiser
Der Alte
Linde Prelog
Magdalena Kropiunig
Toni Slama
Rainer Gradischnig
Johannes Zeiler
Max Schmiedl
Nicoletta Prokes
Götz Spielmann
Director / Writer / Producer
Sandra Bohle
Producer
Mathias Forberg
Producer
Heinz Stussak
Producer
Revanche Ratings & Reviews
CrossCutCritic
May 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.
Film Comment Magazine
Nicolas Rapold
"It works because Spielmann has established that we're not watching belabored dramatic trajectories collide, but an encounter between two people in miles-away mindsets."
Lessons of Darkness
Nick Schager
An unbearably taut, slow-simmering noir transposed to the vast countryside and its patient, drawn-out rhythms.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
There's real biblical tragedy, and redemption, in Spielmann's fine, sad, suspenseful film.
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Spielmann's deft storytelling is coupled with immaculate compositions that constrain the characters as confidently as any prison bars.
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
A film of carefully strained pulp and rigorously controlled intrigue, the Austrian revenge drama Revanche, which is really about the dividing line between vengeance and forgiveness, belongs to a neo-noir universe where all the classical genre laws apply.
Movie Retriever
Brian Tallerico
So few characters in Hollywood thrillers ever feel real. The true achievement of Revanche may be that Spielmann's characters sometimes feel too much so.
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Writer-director Gotz Spielmann (Antares) avoids the clutter and manipulation of most thrillers, escalating tension almost solely through the characters' turbulent emotions.
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Revanche involves a rare coming together of a male's criminal nature and a female's deep needs, entwined with a first-rate thriller.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Joe Williams
The title Revanche means 'retribution,' and this Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film is a European extract of neo-noir, like a Bavarian Body Heat or a Teutonic 21 Grams.
Denver Post
Lisa Kennedy
The performers do terrifically understated work. Even in a scene of angry, anguished coupling, silence and stillness persist.
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
Revanche is an extraordinary film, mythic in feeling, about an ex-con who falls in love with a prostitute and how their lives intertwine fatefully with that of a policeman and his wife.
Washington Post
Michael O'Sullivan
The uniformly crackerjack cast keeps things electric, yet always believable, even when behaving in ways that are shocking.
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
As long as Revanche focuses on the relationship between Tamara (Irina Potapenko), an indentured Ukrainian prostitute, and Alex (Johannes Krisch), the ex-con gofer and would-be tough guy who wants to help her escape, it's riveting.
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Intense and emotional.
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
The title means 'revenge', but that's a deliberate simplification; Mr. Spielmann's film is full of surprises and, in its distinctive way, full of life.
New York Post
V.A. Musetto
The coincidences might be too much for some, but viewers who can get past them will be treated to a suspenseful, well-acted, crisply photographed character study.
New York Times
A.O. Scott
A tidy, glum thriller that aims for a tone of sour humanism, perched just on the near edge of cynical despair.
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
There's a moral beauty in the movie's consideration of violence and vengeance.
AV Club
Noel Murray
Revanche is, first and foremost, a good story, craftily told.
Take Plex everywhere
Watch free anytime, anywhere, on almost any device.
See the full list of supported devices
Home
Live TV
On Demand
Discover