Synopsis
Alexandra moves through time like a body that has survived its own destruction. After a rape that takes place during a New Year’s Eve party, the young actress falls into a blurred zone of consciousness where trauma ceases to be mere memory and becomes organic matter—smell, flesh, instinct. Around her unfolds a universe governed by masculine violence, hunting, and domination: skinned wild boars, butchered pigs, blood, rifles, dissected bodies. While performing Medea in the theatre, Alexandra gradually transforms the stage into a ritual space in which pain takes the form of tragic fury. Beside her, her brother Adrián obsessively pursues revenge, unable to understand that the true devastation does not concern his wounded masculine pride, but his sister’s inner abyss.
Review
5 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 10. May 2026
The body keeps the score.
— Bessel van der Kolk
— Bessel van der Kolk
La furia does not tell a rape: it tells the moment in which the human being regresses to its animal origin. Gemma Blasco constructs a work that rejects any moral pedagogy or psychological reassurance and instead plunges into the biological matter of violence. Here, trauma is not a theme: it is an ecosystem. Every image in the film seems to emerge from a primordial slaughterhouse where the female body and the animal body share the same sacrificial exposure.
Open carcasses, flesh torn from skin: everything points to a civilization that continues to be founded on the domination of the most vulnerable. The man in the film is almost always a hunter. He carries the rifle as a symbolic extension of phallic power, as an archaic instrument of domination over living beings. Rape, then, does not appear as a pathological deviation but as the extreme continuation of a logic of possession that silently permeates every social space. Blasco films masculinity as a predatory force sedimented within culture, an ancient mechanism that continues to confuse desire with conquest, body with territory.
Alexandra can no longer separate men from the animal scent of violence. One of the most powerful scenes in the film takes place in a nightclub: while dancing among her male friends, her body moves toward them almost like a wounded animal trying to identify its predator. She does not look at faces: she searches for the smell of rape. It is an extraordinary scene that shifts trauma from the psychological to the sensory level. Memory no longer passes through rational recollection but through smell, instinct, and animal perception of danger. Alexandra becomes a body that sniffs out evil. There is no longer eroticism, only a zoology of threat.
In this sense, the film constantly converses with Greek tragedy. Medea is not merely the character Alexandra performs: she is the mythological form of her inner transformation. The Greek dimension of La furia emerges everywhere, even in apparently secondary images. The Venus de Milo, observed by Alexandra, ceases to be an icon of classical beauty and becomes a bleeding body. In the protagonist’s gaze, the statue loses its marble quality and turns into violated flesh: the imaginary blood flowing from her pelvis and breasts restores to femininity the entire millennial history of its exposure to masculine desire, war, and possession. Western beauty is suddenly returned to its sacrificial origin. Likewise through the posters of Antigone, Electra, and Medea…
The theatre also becomes a place of ritual distortion. The scene of the table progressively extending across the stage possesses an almost metaphysical force. That table seems to devour space, transforming into altar, tribunal, sacrificial surface. It is the physical extension of violence into theatrical language. Everything in the film tends toward the expansion of the wound: objects stretch, silences dilate, bodies become too heavy for the space they inhabit.
And then there is Adrián, perhaps the most elementary character in the work. Apparently protective, he actually embodies one of the film’s most ferocious insights: the masculine inability to conceive female pain outside its own wounded ego. Adrián does not truly seek justice for Alexandra. He seeks to restore himself—his virile pride, his sense of control. His sister’s rape becomes, in his eyes, a symbolic offense against the man he believes himself to be. His obsessive drive for revenge does not arise from listening to trauma but from a narcissistic need to respond to humiliation. He is a devastating character precisely because he is deeply realistic: he loves Alexandra, but he never truly sees her.
For this reason, the scene in which Alexandra pins her rapist against the wall carries an almost unbearable intensity. There is no spectacular liberation, no indulgence in contemporary revenge-movie gratification. Blasco avoids any heroic aestheticization of vengeance. Alexandra does not reclaim power: she reclaims the ability to look evil in the face without dissolving. It is something entirely different. Her gesture does not belong to justice, but to ontological survival.
And finally comes the impossible, terrible, necessary catharsis. When Alexandra consumes flesh on stage, when her body definitively merges with Medea, the film reaches its most radical point: the woman transformed into a tragic creature, beyond civil language, beyond social composure, beyond victimhood itself. Fury is no longer individual rage. It becomes ancestral force, primitive energy that traverses centuries of patriarchal violence and returns them in ritual form.
We can read Audition by Takashi Miike and La furia as two variations of the same contemporary myth: that of violence as the original form of human relation, not as accident but as the subterranean structure of desire and power.
Gemma Blasco thus creates a rare work: one that forces the spectator to remain within the unbearable continuity between animality, desire, domination, and civilization. It is precisely this absence of reconciliation that makes it one of the most artistically radical, disturbing, and philosophically unsettling films of contemporary cinema.
“Women are by nature fearful and prone to cowardice when confronted with force and weapons; but when wronged in bed, no heart is more murderous.”
— Euripides, Medea
— Euripides, Medea
