The Vigilante’s Subversion of the Revenge Fantasy Sub-Genre in Light of the #MeToo Movement Anonymous College

Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s A Vigilante is about Sadie, a survivor of domestic abuse who transforms into a figure capable of helping other women who have nowhere else to turn. Indeed, she becomes the eponymous, avenging warrior that punishes men who endanger their wives, girlfriends, or families. It is difficult to contemplate Sarah Daggar-Nickson’s directorial debut without affirming the role that the Me Too Movement (or, #MeToo, as it more commonly appears in print) has played in cultivating a space where women feel encouraged to speak up against sexual harassment, assault, and violence. Even though the social-gender import of Daggar-Nickson’s finds weightage in this cultural phenomenon, the film also functions as a measured and thoughtful, fantastical subversion of the roles that men and women occupy in this dialogue.

The personal accounts shared by women of their experience with sexual harassment, assault, and violence, in the course of the Me Too Movement across different platforms, have been, naturally, varied, but an underlying essence of these accounts has been a reiteration and emphasis on the trauma, pain, and suffering that survivors have to bear long after being subjected to mistreatments of this nature. Daggar-Nickson...