Out of Fantasia Film Festival, Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter arrives like a hive of angry bees in a hot tin roof. Von Carolsfeld, who co-wrote the script with Doug Taylor, mines the rape/revenge genre with a fine-tooth comb. She pulls on threads found in Promising Young Woman and Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, which in turn pay homage to a genre rich with thorny, vengeful touchstones to the point of exsanguination. Horror is littered with fangy revenge tales (The Virgin Spring, I Spit on Your Grave, Ms .45) that seek pure bloodletting for the ruin men have unleashed on the world.
But we rarely, if ever, see the story told through the eyes of a defense lawyer who successfully exonerates a client accused of rape. In Someone’s Daughter, Von Carolsfeld confronts the moral complications for someone whose job it is to defend the utterly irredeemable. It’s a brilliant character study through which the audience confronts their own place in a world hellbent on disbelieving victims and letting sexual predators walk.
Sam (Pascale Bussières) is a defense lawyer. She’s used to spinning a tale rather than relying on the truth. After being kidnapped, she finds herself on a deserted island with a former client, Paul (François Arnaud), an accused rapist whom she exonerated. Paul is handsome, charming, and knows how to work people. Now, they’re both stuck in the same boat, with nothing but the past trailing quickly behind them. Through several conversations, Sam and Paul discuss what happened 15 years ago. Paul laments the destruction of his life while Sam hides how much she’s tortured every single day for the irreparable damage she’s caused. Their worlds now collide in vicious fashion, with both parties contending with the cold, hard facts.
As they attempt to find their way out of the wilderness, Sam learns to admit her foolishness and stop cycles of abuse from continuing. She also considers what retribution means and how blood will always stain someone’s hands, even if not hers. Someone’s Daughter is as much a survival horror/thriller as it is an analysis about human nature in all its tarnished forms—those who cause the pain, those who defend it, and those who do nothing to stop it. In the mix, few fight tooth and nail against a system that’s designed with only those with real power in mind.
Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s Someone’s Daughter feels akin to Alison Locke’s 2022 horror/thriller The Apology, which approached the subject with a more keen, intimate eye than most revenge films. Both are cut from similar cloth, stylistically and thematically, but they’re delivered in stark and blindingly contrasting ways. When it comes to the rape/revenge subgenre of horror, there’s an understanding about the social climate in which a film is made. 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave came at a very different time than, say, Mary Beth McAndrew’s Bystanders, a gem from last year that deconstructs the format with a bit of humor and a relentless, fire-fueled hunger for flesh.
Someone’s Daughter stands in the middle of a firestorm. In 2026, it’s equally transgressive and progressive, particularly as it explores a woman working inside a patriarchal industry and the things she’s forced, by herself and society, to accept and endure. Especially when it calls into question her own morality, the film expertly questions if there’s any use in fighting at all, or if it’s finally time just to let it all burn to the ground.
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