Do Revenge, a dark teen comedy that recently premiered on Netflix, follows two teenage heroines named Drea (Camila Mendes) and Eleanor (Maya Hawke) as they collaborate and hatch a plan to “do each other’s revenge.” Do revenge is inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and loaded with homages to teen cult films from the 1990s and 2000s like Mean Girls and Clueless.
The queen bee of an elite high school, Drea, suffers a downfall when her I-run-this-school boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) shows a nude film of her to the whole school. The satire is presented in a way that is ridiculous enough to be funny but realistic enough for you to remember the Max in your life. Drea’s reaction, a quick punch across his face, gets her in trouble, while Max not only avoids consequences but is praised by his peers for being so brave.
At a tennis camp, Drea meets Eleanor, and the two instantly click over their intense animosity for the people who destroyed their lives: Max for Drea and Carissa, another student, for Eleanor, whom she accuses of outing her and portraying as a predator when they were younger. To get back at one other, the two decide to devise a plot to eliminate each other’s arch enemy. Eleanor quickly infiltrates Max’s group after getting a Clueless-style makeover, while Drea masterfully identifies Carissa’s weakness and ultimately brings her down in a hallucinogenic sequence involving drugging the entire senior class.
However, since Max is the power structure personified, eliminating him is not that simple. His peers’ admiration simply serves to highlight how vile he is and serves as an effective statement on how easily guys can get away with anything. Eleanor must fully integrate herself into Max’s gang in order to expose his several women sex affairs with his fiancée. The incident seems significant, and Drea is prancing around with a satisfaction akin to Regina George, but it’s obvious that the story is leading up to something bigger a needless plot turn that destroys the wonder of Drea and Eleanor’s chaos-driven friendship.
