In the dog days of a sweltering 1986 Australian summer, Penny Lane (Bailey Spalding) and her best friends Toni (Tahlee Fereday) and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) have her secluded house all to themselves. They’re planning on celebrating her getting into college, and they’ve got an entire weekend to do whatever they want, with no one around to keep them on their best behavior.

But what they did not count on is the arrival of Penny’s cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn). While they used to be as close as sisters, the pair’s relationship is now hopelessly strained. Kat is jealous of Penny for unspoken reasons, and she intends to use this get-together to spring a cruel prank.

That’s how writer-director Mia’Kate Russell’s fearless, violently unbalanced, pitch-black comedic chiller Penny Lane Is Dead begins, and Kat’s disgusting joke is only the starting point: things only get more nihilistic and depraved from there. Once she gets kicked out of the house — only to return with her unhinged, older, drug-dealing boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) and his two thuggish compatriots — all bets are off, like some deranged Ozploitation melding of Funny Games, Revenge, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Safe to say, this one is not for the faint of heart.

What’s interesting is that, even in purposeful shorthand, amid all the deranged darkness, rampant immorality, and abhorrent terror, Russell still slips in a delightfully sweet little love story. Penny and Toni have been engaged in a clandestine affair for quite some time, and they’re planning on making their coupling official once they get away from this small, conservative community and into the progressive safety of collegiate life. Spalding and Fereday have instantaneous chemistry, and the heat between them is sweetly palpable.

Good thing, too, because Kat’s intrusion happens almost immediately, while Angus’s arrival takes place not too long after that. Russell swings for the fences. Moments of absurdist, almost Monty Python-esque comedy sit precariously alongside sequences of torturous ugliness. No character, not even the sweetest one, is immune from sickening abominations. As for Penny, whether she’s truly dead or not is the central mystery; that Angus beats her to a bloody pulp and subsequently rapes her decidedly is not.

This isn’t a spoiler. It’s clear from the moment Angus enters the picture that this is what he intends to do to Penny. What the audience does need to discover is how the other characters react to his actions, most notably Kat. Her presence makes the film far more complicated than it initially appears to be. Russell isn’t delivering a straightforward feminist manifesto. Instead, she’s working in murky waters of moral gray, entirely by design.
Not that key elements of the genre are not paid attention to. Fereday proves to be a strong survivor, and her skills with a machete should not be trivialized. The actor showcases a resolute, internalized ferocity that took me by surprise. She gives back more than she takes, and her virulent back-and-forth engagements with O’Toole have verbal and physical weight. 

But this stuff is to be expected. While there are minor variations on the theme (not all of Angus’s crew are quite as accepting of his heinous shenanigans), for the most part these aspects of the thriller follow a standard playbook.
It’s Kat who proves to be the wildcard. She is the monster that makes all of Russell’s musings about sexual violence and female rage go in an entirely unforeseen direction. Penny’s cousin is broken, but she still has agency. She sees where things are headed and must make a decision as to how far she’s willing to allow Angus to follow his murderous agenda to its completion. How much one accepts her decision and its chilling aftermath is contributes to deciding if this nasty bit of a home-invasion terror is worth watching or not. I’m guessing many will choose to look away, walk out, or turn it off.

But I don’t think they should. Wright-Mendelsohn is magnificent. The actor does not shy away from the central, abhorrent darkness nosily lurking at the heart of this madness. She’s a maelstrom of physical and emotional momentum, pinwheeling from one extreme to the next as she contemplates where Kat’s jealousy of Penny and her former friends is going to take her, and leaving her with no other choice than homicidal hysteria. And yet, as irredeemable as her actions are, Wright-Mendelsohn manages to make this spitfire of a demonic abomination almost sympathetic. She’s absolutely extraordinary.

Not all of this one works, and the wild shifts in tone from ghoulishly nasty comedy to exploitation horror can be discombobulating. Additionally, one death hit me as much too cruel, even for this genre, and for a brief moment I almost turned completely against Russell’s feature-length debut and considered not watching the rest of the film — and I watch everything, no matter how awful, to the end. This, again, leads me to believe that many in the audience won’t be nearly as forgiving.

While you should know going in what Penny Lane Is Dead is going to show you, I say stick with it, no matter how uncomfortable watching may prove to be. Russell has real storytelling talent, and she’s packed her horror throwback with signature moments I’ll be pondering for quite some time. Most of all, she’s got Wright-Mendelsohn, whose titanic arrival as Kat is worthy of euphoric applause. I cannot wait to see what she’s going to do next.