Thriller: A Cruel Picture goes by the name Thriller: En grym film in its original Swedish. And “grym” it is, an archetypal grindhouse thriller whose main character provided the inspiration for Daryl Hannah’s one-eyed Elle Driver in Tarantino’s Kill Bill, a light comedy by comparison.
Director Bo Arne Vibenius has stated that he set out to make “the most commercial film ever made”. Clearly the statement of a man high on his own supply, Vibenius’s film is one of very few that managed to get itself banned in Sweden. In the USA, cut to bits, it went by the name They Call Her One Eye or Hooker’s Revenge or The Swedish Vice-Girl and racked up quite a cult following on the late-night circuit. “Commercial” it isn’t.
But it is the first rape-revenge movie to feature the victim herself getting payback. Its central character, Madeleine (Christina Lindberg) has much to get revenge for. Sexually abused as a kid, Madeleine has grown up mute as a consequence, which marks her out as an easy target for pimp Tony (Heinz Hopf), who kidnaps and drugs the god-fearing young beauty after wining and dining her in early scenes fraught with anticipatory dread. Soon, Madeleine has been turned into a heroin addict and been put to work as a whore. But she’s not going to go down without a fight. She scratches the face of her very first customer, to which Tony responds by cutting out Madeleine’s eye.
The eye-gouging is graphic (done on a corpse, apparently). So is the sex and the scenes of shooting up, but the revenge aspect doesn’t really get going until Madeleine has won Tony’s trust. Using her one day a week off wisely, she learns to drive, becomes adept at karate, learns to handle a gun, skills that will come into their own in the film’s bloody final section.
Vibenius is at his best at the movie’s bookends, his camera catching the lurid strangeness of the 1970s – so much orange – in the film’s early scenes. In the revenge section at the end, a highly subjective camera eventually settles down into something much more like Sergio Leone on 16mm, for a finale that owes something to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Before things get properly gothic in the closing moments when Madeleine finally gets round to giving Tony his just deserts. A horse is involved. I’ll say no more.
The middle is another matter. It goes on way too long. Lindberg’s naked body is used extensively, as a distraction. There is slo-mo too, which doesn’t help.
Lindberg is lovely to look at, it can’t be denied. A slip of a girl, there is much satisfaction to be had watching her making her bid for freedom and taking on Tony and his enablers. Heinz Hopf, in a role you could imagine Alan Rickman getting stuck into, is an excellent Tony: fastidious, unctuous and sadistically cruel.
Revenge is a dish best served cold and Vibenius goes at his subject in the way the rape-revenge thriller has done it ever since – coolly and deliberately. The lack of dialogue, with Hopf getting most of it, really helps reinforce the starkness of Vibenius’s ambition and Alden Shuman’s score of plucked bleeps ups the weirdness.
Explicit and gruesome, once upon a time films like this were a semi-legitimate outlet for sexual fantasies. Now the internet handles all that. So what’s left once you strip out the sex, drugs and slaughter? It is the film’s raw immediacy, I’d say. A tale of the tawdry and nasty rather than a tawdry, nasty film, with a directness that gets to the heart of the matter.
I watched the Vinegar Syndrome 4K restoration, which includes the very cut US version of the film as a bonus. The quality of the picture, for 16mm, is very good, but throughout Madeleine (as everyone speaking in Swedish in the film calls her) is referred to as Frigga. I thought this adoption of a Nordic goddess’s name was Madeleine’s way of reclaiming her agency. But no. Apparently “Frigga” is just what the subtitlers decided on rather than use the straightforward “Madeleine”. Strange, but there we are.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
