From South African director Matthew A. Brown comes Julia (playing tonight at Screamfest in Hollywood, CA), a vicious debut feature that addresses victimhood and tooth-and-claw emancipation from a male-dominated world. This is a particularly nasty rape-revenge film, a subgenre that typically takes its female characters on a self-destructive arc. Brown adds his own grisly twists to well-worn territory though, with uneven results. Overall though, Julia is a freshly gruesome and engaging thriller.

Emotionally fragile Julia (Ashley C. Williams – The Human Centipede) is a clinician at a plastic surgeon’s office. When a client (Ryan Cooper) asks her over for a date, she’s drugged and gang raped, left for dead alongside a riverside. Afterwards, she doesn’t report it to the police and retreats further into her world of self-harm. Then she learns about a special form of therapy for rape victims, an exclusive treatment for the most brutalized victims provided by the mysterious Dr. Sgundud (Jack Noseworthy). Combining Julia’s alluring sexuality with gradually increasing violence, the therapy helps Julia take her power back (but at what cost?).

Now that sounds like your usual rape-revenge scenario, but the inclusion of Dr. Sgundud adds a whole new, really bizarre layer that doesn’t always work. When he’s first introduced, it feels organic to Julia’s story. She’s been savaged now she’s in special therapy. But as her treatment goes on, Sgundud and his strict rules feel like they belong in an entirely different, lesser film of a B-nature. By the time the third act rolls around, the Sgundud thread sort of blew the story for me, but I can’t help appreciate Brown’s intention to add some wicked flair to his rape-revenge tale.

Of course, with a rape-revenge film, the anticipation always revolves around seeing the scum get their comeuppance. In Julia, Brown takes his sweet time getting to that point – building up tension as Julia sheds her skin to become a killer. Her therapy starts out light, with her luring men out of bars and jumping them on the street. Then it builds up to castration and a whole slew of gloriously fucked up things happening to sexual predators. Soon, Julia’s mindset begins to spiral with each empowering bout of violence.

Through it all, Ashley C. Williams is impressive to behold. She doesn’t have many lines in the film, but Williams lets us witness Julia’s transformation through sheer physicality and expression. It’s a fine performance and a pretty damn brave on too. A lot of critics will probably want to rap about the feminism or female empowerment in Julia, how the women form a relationship by lashing out against the slimy men who victimize them. While Brown certainly puts us inside the mind of a victim at their breaking point, any form of female empowerment, however, comes off as a male-version of feminism (Brown also wrote the film), complete with lesbian shower kisses!

All attempts at commentary aside, Julia is a darkly stylistic thriller that’s going to satisfy fans who can stomach its graphic nature. It stumbles in the third act, but ultimately it’s a striking debut feature that builds upon a timeworn subgenre.