Do Revenge, review: this high school spin on Hitchcock is bottom of the class

Hollywood has been working flat out to resurrect the teenage coming-of-age drama, with TV shows like Euphoria and movies such as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (and even video games like Life Is Strange). But Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s Do Revenge is surely the most shameless attempt yet to plug into nostalgia for Heathers, Cruel Intentions and other staples of the genre.

In the manner of Oasis ballads that steal all their best bits from the Beatles, it suffers for being deafeningly derivative. The film is also snarled up with a streak of sadism which defeats even the best efforts of a sparkling Maya Hawke.

The Stranger Things star is Eleanor, an awkward lesbian teenager haunted by memories of a cruel classmate. She is put on the path of revenge following a chance encounter with Drea (Camila Mendes from Riverdale, the TV horror version of the Archie comics) – who likewise has had her life derailed by despicable peers.

“Teenage girls – sometimes they’re just evil,” says a character at one point. And that is essentially the thesis of a dreary dramedy that comes off as Alicia Silverstone's Clueless with a spotty Gen-Z Instagram filter.

As with that 1995 classic, Do Revenge is set in an elite high school. The message is that rich people – rich adolescent girls in particular – are the most vacuous individuals on earth and that we should cheer Drea and Eleanor as they set about their campaign of social sabotage.

One rare concession to the 21st century is Drea’s “progressive” former boyfriend, Max (Austin Abrams). He is a well-observed and very punchable caricature of the sort of “woke bro” who publicly rails against the patriarchy while privately treating women as possessions to be gaslit and taken for granted.

Do Revenge tries to win you over with a sugar rush of teen movie references. There’s a 1990s-heavy soundtrack (Le Tigre and Hole), while Cruel Intentions star Sarah Michelle Gellar has been cast as the school principal (Game Of Thrones’s Sophie Turner has a fun cameo as a spoiled debutante).

The other inspiration is Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. It is from Hitchcock that it borrows the idea of seemingly unconnected individuals – Eleanor and Drea meet randomly over the holidays – agreeing to become the other’s agent of revenge.

Robinson squeezes in a twist which gives the final third of the movie a stone-cold jolt. But neither she nor her vivacious leads can overcome the central flaw of Eleanor and Drea ultimately being as hollow and self-obsessed as their schoolmates. Every great Nineties teen flick gave you someone to root for. In Do Revenge, even the heroines are tedious narcissists. If anyone has the right to feel hard done by, it’s the audience.

On Netflix now