Our August programming hops from The Hamptons to nearby Block Island, RI, the popular summer destination at the heart of Michael Roemer’s manic family drama Vengeance Is Mine. More or less forgotten since its premiere on PBS in 1984, Roemer’s capstone film follows Jo (Brooke Adams a few years after Days of Heaven and Invasion of the Body Snatchers), a mercurial young professional whose decision to flee her abusive partner lands her in the middle of another family’s rapid dissolution.

Released to little fanfare in its day, Vengeance Is Mine marked Roemer’s last film in a career full of delicate, though underseen, films. Born in Germany, but educated in postwar America, Roemer was a Harvard alum who made films that dealt with difficult subjects: penury (Cortile Cascino), racial prejudice (Nothing But A Man), death (Dying and Pilgrim, Farewell). He applied documentary tactics to his fiction features and in so doing created films that arrived at emotional truths by way of lived-in performances, gliding camerawork, and protean narratives. Vengeance Is Mine exemplifies this approach, unleashing a dramatic plot of intense highs and lows that’s grounded in vulnerable performances from its ensemble cast.

Because of its lackluster reception upon release, Vengeance Is Mine never received a theatrical run until 2022. The belated showcase was made possible via Jake Perlin and his distribution company The Film Desk, who put out the film on a new 35mm print. Perlin also rescued Roemer’s New York comedy The Plot Against Harry from oblivion and more recently re-released Dying and Pilgrim, Farewell; he’s also helped organize retrospectives of Roemer’s work at Anthology Film Archives, Film Forum and the Harvard Film Archive.

“In this film, Roemer’s ideas of character come to fullest fruition. Roemer has said that his characters believe themselves to be proactive, but are, in fact, reactive. They may think they know what they are doing, but, in the end, they are at the mercy of chance. What all of Roemer’s work shares is an assuredness of its own pace, in step only with itself, all utterly original works confronting major themes in a minor key.” JAKE PERLIN

Roemer wrote that he was “aware of the unpredictability of human existence” and that “life doesn’t arrange itself into neat, coherent patterns.” This awareness is put into practice in Vengeance Is Mine, a film that is unpredictable by design and unravels according to the emotional logic of its characters rather than the conventions of plot. Each moment in the film has the spark of spontaneity—a virtue that reflects Roemer’s ability to make films that embody the places, people, and problems in them rather than merely depicting them.

Michael Roemer (1928-2025) was a filmmaker with a sensitive heart and exacting mind. He was born in Berlin and escaped to the United Kingdom via Kindertransport in 1939 before making his way to the United States and attending Harvard in 1945. Over the next decade, Roemer worked on newsreels before teaming up with fellow filmmaker Robert Young (Short Eyes) and co-directing the controversial Cortile Cascino. His first solo feature, Nothing But A Man, depicted the tolls of systemic racism and earned praise from Malcolm X. His subsequent film, The Plot Against Harry, was never released around the time of its production, but is now recognized as a singular comedic feat. Near the end of his career, Roemer dealt with the anxieties surrounding death in films like Dying and Pilgrim, Farewell.

Vengeance Is Mine is streaming for two weeks until September 3. Due to licensing rights, this film will not be available to view in France.

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer.