Like a twisted Gift of the Magi, everybody loves someone & royally screws it up, but there isn’t enough love to have sympathy for anyone that you don’t have a formal obligation to love in this bleak movie. All movies are contrived in some way, but it felt like the director was inspired by the revenge movies of the 70s & asked himself, “What would happen if there were several people who had the right to commit revenge against each other?” then had to reverse engineer a scenario to make that happen. There are themes of how the failures of society’s bureaucracy (corporations, health care & government in its absence until after the proverbial crap hits the fan) poisons personal relationships and ties. There is a pervasive disability/inability throughout the film’s characters, but instead of making them sympathetic or an aspect of their character-not more or less important than any other characteristic, it makes them vaguely sinister or at least the gateway to something bleaker. The camera purposely seems distant. If two people share a frame, one of the two is not completely in the frame, and the camera does not want to follow one person completely. The good news: the point of the film is that vengeance does nothing but wreak havoc, and it can’t return what is lost. The bad news: the most touching & authentic moment that shows love occurs in an elevator when a man briefly mourns the loss of his loved one by secretly taking her hand as she is carted off by authorities. Another almost dystopian world without any fantastic elements just simply the absence of redemption. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is a good film, but not an enjoyable one.