‘A Woman Scorned’ VOD Review
Stars: Megan Purvis, Hannah Pauley, Aaron-Jon North, Georgia Wood, Chelsea Greenwood | Written by Anya Vallentin | Directed by Becca Hirani, Michael Hoad
Some movies want to be deep. A Woman Scorned just wants to watch Megan Purvis beat the living hell out of people, and honestly, it’s all the better for it.
Directed by Becca Hirani and Michael Hoad, A Woman Scorned starts off with a simple setup: two sisters, Jas (Purvis) and Laura (Hannah Pauley), escape to the English countryside for a quiet, healing weekend. Unfortunately, they run into a pack of greasy, sinister men led by Randy (a magnificently slimy Aaron-Jon North). What begins as a tense brush-off quickly escalates into home invasion, murder, and, very, very messy revenge.
It’s a straightforward premise, but that’s what makes it sing. Once things kick off, A Woman Scorned becomes a full-throttle, blood-soaked tale of survival and payback, and Purvis is absolutely electric at the centre of it all. Gone is any pretence of delicate trauma recovery; when Jas finds Laura dead, she flips the switch from “grieving sister” to “unstoppable killing machine” in record time.
Purvis delivers exactly the kind of performance this movie needs: emotional enough to make you care, feral enough to make you cheer. Watching her stalk, trap, and brutally dispatch the gang members is a grimy, guilty pleasure. She’s a one-woman army, taking out sleazebags with whatever’s at hand — and the film doesn’t shy away from the violence either. It’s messy, cathartic, and surprisingly satisfying.
Technically, it’s typical low-budget British genre fare. The lighting’s sometimes a bit murky, the sound wobbles here and there, and the rural settings are more “weekend Airbnb” than “cinematic wilderness.” But none of that matters when the pace is this tight and the action is this gleefully savage.
Special mention has to go to Aaron-Jon North, whose performance as Randy is wonderfully hateable. He’s exactly the kind of villain you can’t wait to see get his comeuppance, and when it comes, it’s gloriously brutal.
Clocking in at a lean 84 minutes, A Woman Scorned doesn’t waste a second. It’s an old-school revenge flick stripped down to the bone: simple setup, despicable bad guys, and an avenging angel who’s all out of patience (and mercy).
Ultimately, A Woman Scorned is pure, scuzzy, late-night carnage. Exactly the kind of bloody, low-budget revenge romp that knows its audience and absolutely delivers. Megan Purvis cements her status as the go-to face of British genre filmmaking (and is a total badass at the same time), and I was there for every blood-soaked second of it.
**** 4/5
A Woman Scorned is out now on digital platforms in the US. The film is set for a digital release in the UK on June 9th, courtesy of High Fliers.
