Do Revenge, a sharp Netflix dark comedy starring Camila Mendes and Maya Hawke as vengeance-obsessed high schoolers, is a virtual parade of teen movie nostalgia – a shopping mall of homages, if you will. The students at posh Rosehill Academy in Miami wear ludicrously elaborate outfits, a la Clueless. Popular kids lounge on a fountain, a la Scream. There’s a tour of Rosehill’s cliques – the zodiac thoughts club, the theater nerds – a la Mean Girls and 10 Things I Hate About You. As in She’s All That or Clueless or countless others, Mendes’s Drea, a stone-cold striver singularly focused on getting into – where else? – Yale, gives awkward newcomer Eleanor (Hawke) a makeover. Rosehill’s principal, the only adult character, is played by 90s star Sarah Michelle Gellar.
It would be easy for a film to get lost in the reference sauce, but Do Revenge, written by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Celeste Ballard, thankfully strings together the familiar tributes and tropes with updated allusions aimed for Gen Z. The Rosehill elite drop such Twitter-speak as “choosing violence”, “safe space”, and “as a fellow woman of color” with delicious disdain. The no-skips soundtrack pairs such 90s nods as Meredith Brooks, Hole and Fatboy Slim with contemporary needle drops from Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, MUNA and Caroline Polachek’s So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings. (Amanda Yamate and Este Haim, of the band Haim, created the effective neo-noir score.) The school’s golden boy, ultra-rich louche Max (Euphoria’s Austin Abrams) has painted nails and ample jewelry – more faux-sensitive boy than jock, Harry Styles than John Tucker.
