Critics reviews

“Femme” walks a complicated line between its revenge narrative and self-empowerment... [The film] feels steeped in a quiet rage without getting as violent or outlandish as something like the rape revenge thriller “Ms. 45” but its seriousness with how it justifies Jules actions feels off.

[Femme] avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too: Sometimes vengeance pales in comparison to the realization that your enemy is too small and pathetic to bother kicking around.

“Femme” near-fully pulls off its devastating double bill: There’s the film’s visceral exploration of the trauma spinning out of a homophobic attack, and then there’s the exploration of the tricky feelings that emerge when two people are bonded by violence... [The film ends] with such an unsettling lack of clarity or position, it’s enough to leave you as bruised as the complexly haunted people it has already drawn so clearly.

Femme is the feature-length adaptation of a short, yet it never suggests a thin idea stretched to 90 minutes. If anything I wish the film allowed us to bathe in its most morally murky moments longer; the suddenness with which it races to a disappointingly conventional resolution is the only misstep among a bold, remarkably assured debut feature.

Femme is a debut that aces the bulk of its big scenes, mainly intimacies where the characters are close enough either to arouse or strike at the throat. In doing so, it makes its own argument for why - contra the new puritans of social media - the cinema still needs its sex scenes. Sometimes these, too, tell a story - in this case a charged and arresting one.

A pulse-pounding thriller delivered through a fascinating dual character study... This kind of revenge story isn’t new, and neither is the idea of a closeted homophobe projecting his internal shame onto those comfortable in their identity... But here, execution matters — the clarity of directorial vision, grounded screenplay and excellent performances make Femme a vividly compelling ride.

Femme is all about the men’s ability to dissemble and assume a variety of identities to suit the milieu of the modern metropolis where sexual identity is not longer simply a question of ‘male’ and ‘female’ but has become a multifarious melting pot of myriad styles capturing the mercurial zeitgeist of gaydom.

As “Femme” reaches its ultraviolent climax, what lingers is the bitter aftertaste of emptiness. The searing pain that cuts through both characters is at once harrowing and empty, the exercise attempted by Freeman and Ping one far too concerned with the dangers of ambiguity to pay attention to the cunning trap of blatancy.

A tense, sometimes startling revenge drama... A pair of sensational performances by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and George MacKay... represents the chief selling point for this stylish, commendably uncompromising fusion of genre fireworks and measured, thoughtful character study.

Femme is subversive, unsettling and sexually charged... [It] is a tremendously effective revenge movie; a picture that reframes the neo-noir by harnessing a hate crime and diverting its power into a thrillingly transgressive erotic thriller.

Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.

Expanding their 2021 short film of the same name, debuting directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping bring plenty of provocative ideas about queer power dynamics and different forms of drag to the table. But the result is disappointingly sluggish, its payoff ineffectual.