Zoe Lund in Ms. 45 (Drafthouse Films)

Thana (Zoë Lund) hasn’t had it good in life. She doesn’t really have any family or friends, she works for pittance at a clothing workshop, and she can’t speak; she’s mute. One day walking home she’s pulled into an alley and raped by a man in a mask. She staggers home, bewildered, but before she can get her bearings she comes upon another man in her apartment, who was in the midst of a theft. He instead decides to go ahead for the rape. Twice in one day? Fat chance of that—she finally takes her moment and Thana hits the guy to the ground and then with an iron kills him.

From then on this 1981 film gets into something of a quandary, but a truly fascinating one. This isn’t quite an exploitation flick, but it’s not really a vigilante action-revenge picture like Death Wish, and yet it has hints of both. It’s as though Abel Ferrara and writer Nicholas St. John took the revenge element of Death Wish, where a character pursues unrepentant revenge, but they’re trying to mine some deeper, a completely disconnected mental illness, like in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

Thana isn’t an expert at self-defense, and shouldn’t be as good as she is with the .45 she pulls on Rapist No. 2. But she is good at getting her chance to kill people, even if they haven’t really done anything to her. (One of the more curiously ambiguous scenes is when she meets a guy at a bar. He keeps rambling outside about strangling his cat. She’s about to shoot him, but the gun doesn’t fire. He takes the gun and instead of shooting her shoots himself.)

Not all of Ferrara’s directing abilities of actors at this point in his career are top-notch, but maybe this material deserves sleaze (up until then he’d only made The Driller Killer and some assorted 1970s pornos). Actors playing a pimp and a prostitute (even for one scene) fall flat as believably streetwise. Better is Thana’s boss, a creep who wants to have his way with her but hides it under a thin veneer of professionalism and care.

And it may also be true that Ferrara’s film paints men—hell, most people—as jerks or losers or total dogs, and really, who will miss them when they’re gone? It’s that part of it that makes it an exploitation flick, especially in one sequence at night when Thana goes out and kills the most people (a whole group of gangbangers in the park, an Arab and his chauffeur in a limo). And tugging at the weakest of heart strings, there’s a neighbor who has a little dog, but (gasp) will the dog make it through the end of the film?

A lot of this is pulp, but the story is well directed and given a score that is fresh and cool in an early ‘80’s sort of way. And we do take it most seriously when the camera looks right into Thana’s face and her eyes, which start off terrified and dazed, but soon turns cold and bloodless. Watch when she is surrounded by (over-) concerned co-workers, or when she’s in the bathroom and sees a hand near her breast that isn’t actual there.

She isn’t someone to root for, which is what mucks up the traditional angle of a B movie. Instead, Ferrara is after something a lot deeper. Ms. 45 is action and a bit of horror (dismembered body anyone?), but it’s also a sad tale of a girl without any hope, who is going crazier by the day.