Hard Revenge Milly is a blood-spattered, hyper-violent tale of revenge in Japan’s dystopian near future. After an evil gang murders her husband and daughter, heroine Milly swears vengeance, gets kitted out with bionic body parts, and sets out to confront her foes. Set in an abandoned indust­rial landscape and styled after recent releases like Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, the film boasts the thinn­est of plots. Milly registers not a flicker of emotion, and even the fighting, until the final showdown with vicious gang leader Jack (who is chopped into chunks that are roasted with a flame­thrower and eaten by a dog), amounts to no more than an economical slicing apart of bad guys. And then, suddenly, after 40-odd minutes and with the threat of retribution for Jack’s killing hanging in the air, it’s all over. Locked into a cycle of vengeance, it seems we can expect more of the same from part two.

Hard Revenge Milly: Bloody Battle kicks off in a more recognisably post-apocalyptic setting, where characters walk around in gas masks and water is scarce. Milly is being hunted down by Jack’s gay lover, and has become horribly aware of just how stuck she is in a murderous loop. Approached for help by a girl whose family has also been killed, Milly’s face softens into express­ion for the first time.

Eventually, an injured Milly gets fixed up by a crazy scientist, and confesses that she’s beginn­ing to doubt the truth of her own thoughts and memories. She is becoming more conscious of herself and her environment – and they are becoming more richly realised for us. It’s as if we’re witnessing the growth of a world of increasing complexity, one in which characters become more sophisticated and reflect the evol­utionary process of humanity itself. It’s a bit like watching a line that gradually wriggles into a flat image and then 3D reality, as the viewer is placed in Milly’s head and shares her dawning consciousness.

As an artistic project, this might have been better served by a differ­ent medium; a comic, with its graphic and more open-ended nature, would seem a better fit. We expect stories, especially so in films, to be contained, internally coherent worlds, snow globes that can be shaken but settle back in accordance with understood rules, and if they don’t behave in this manner they feel unsatisfying. That said, compressing this into one shorter piece so the point is more forcefully made and the first part’s longueurs (and Bloody Battle’s flashbacks) could be cut, would improve it immeasurably. It’s possible that Hard Revenge Milly, with its heroine manipulated into unthinking nihilism, is intended as an allegorical sideswipe at the vengeance genre, which leaves one wondering who this was made for and if it has any hope of charming the fight fetishists and gore hounds at whom it’s being squarely marketed.