Films about revenge and what it really costs

A retired hitman comes back for blood after the mob kills his dog — a revenge plot so simple it becomes a whole mythology of violence.

A traumatized hitman rescues trafficked girls with a hammer — brutal, fragmented, more interested in psychological damage than action.

Left for dead by his own crew, a frontiersman crawls back from the brink purely on the fuel of revenge — visceral, punishing filmmaking.

Israeli agents hunt down the planners of the Munich massacre, and the mission slowly corrodes every one of them from the inside.

A father turns vigilante after his son's murder, and the spiral of retaliation escalates far past anything he bargained for.

A teacher gets calm, meticulous revenge on the students responsible for her daughter's death — cold, stylish, and genuinely disturbing.

A Viking prince's quest to avenge his father, staged with mythic, brutal scale — revenge as ancient ritual rather than modern catharsis.

A convict woman pursues the soldiers who wronged her through the Tasmanian wilderness — harrowing and unflinching about the cost of vengeance.

A woman left for dead in the desert turns the tables on the men who did it — a rape-revenge film that reclaims and reinvents the genre.

A woman released after 13 years in prison methodically enacts her revenge — Park Chan-wook closing his Vengeance trilogy with real formal control.

A hacker and a journalist investigate a decades-old disappearance that connects to a much darker family history.

An elite assassin balances single motherhood with the ruthless politics of the killing business — stylish, funny, sharply choreographed.

A bride left for dead works through a kill list of former assassin colleagues — Tarantino turning grindhouse revenge into pure operatic style.

A deaf factory worker's plan to save his sister spirals into a chain of retaliation that consumes everyone involved — bleak and formally daring.

A retired gunslinger takes one last job, and the film quietly dismantles every myth the Western ever told about violence being heroic.

A murdered musician returns from the dead to avenge himself and his fiancée — gothic, stylish, inseparable from its own tragic production history.

A soldier returns home to punish the small-town dealers who terrorized his disabled brother — grim, focused British revenge cinema.

An English ex-con travels to LA to find out who killed his daughter — Soderbergh fractures the timeline into something genuinely hypnotic.

A ronin's request to commit ritual suicide at a lord's estate unravels into a devastating story of dignity and revenge — a towering samurai film.

A woman raised from birth for one purpose, avenging her family, cuts a stylish, bloody path through Meiji-era Japan.