Reflections: Alice Lowe’s Prevenge Q&A screening at Studio 74
Published June 24, 2026
This year’s Exeter Comedy Festival offered a fabulous variety of stand-up and sketch shows. It also featured the festival's very first film event with a screening of the 2016 cult black comedy Prevenge, which was hosted at Studio 74.
The film was followed by a live Q&A with the film’s writer and director Alice Lowe (who you may recognise from her roles in Horrible Histories, Sightseers and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace). The Q&A was hosted by her Prevenge co-star and pride of Exeter, Mike Wozniak. Lowe discussed the British independent film industry, the depiction of female rage on screen and the joyous experience of artistic collaboration.
Prevenge is the story of Ruth, played by Lowe, a pregnant woman who is recently bereaved following her partner’s death in a climbing accident. Ruth believes that her unborn baby is talking to her and telling her to enact a bloody revenge. What ensues is a gloriously gory and darkly hilarious series of events. During the Q&A, Lowe discussed how she often finds anger to be the emotional force that drives her to write and create her films. Lowe was actually pregnant during the creation of the film, and drew upon her own personal fears and experiences at the time. She spoke about how she took inspiration for the story from the way women, pregnant people and mothers are treated in society. Prevenge is a Lynchian, prepartum nightmare, which flips the narrative commonly seen in mainstream film.
Pregnant women are usually portrayed as vulnerable victims but Lowe subverts these audience expectations with hilarious and disturbing results. In the film’s opening sequence, Ruth visits a reptile shop and is shown around by a creepy shopkeeper. The tension is built as we increasingly feel that Ruth is in danger. However, the shocking twist is that Ruth is actually the dangerous one. Prevenge flips the script and turns a character typically seen as ‘weak’ into a violent killer.
Lowe discussed how female characters in film are often written to be likeable and unthreatening to audiences. She sees film as an ‘empathy machine’ that forces the viewer into the characters' world-view even when it is one we would not typically agree with. We often see unlikeable male characters in film and have no issue watching or empathising with them; Lowe cited Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver as an example. However, we aren’t usually asked to empathise with unlikeable female leads. Ruth is both the protagonist and the antagonist of the film. The story is a violent fantasy but the emotional impact is universal.
The film was shot on location in Cardiff over an eleven-day period. Lowe discussed her collaboration with cinematographer Ryan Eddleston, who also worked on her latest film Timestalker (2024). Eddleston’s familiarity with the Welsh capital enabled him to recommend various locations for filming, including the reptile shop from the opening scene. Film is a collaborative art form and Lowe spoke at length about her many long-standing working relationships and what the team brought to the production.
The film’s soundtrack was also hugely important to Lowe. She believes that music is key to all her films and to aiding the viewers' understanding. She listens to a range of songs and film soundtracks when writing and this helps her to pin down the tone of each scene. She describes her collaborations with composer duo Toydrum, who worked on Prevenge and Timestalker, as a perfect creative partnership, with their soundtracks powerfully underscoring her writing.
The Q&A was both informative and hilarious. Lowe covered many topics from her love of David Lynch to women murderers on screen. Throughout the talk she highlighted the value of marginalised voices in cinema, and emphasised the importance of creating stories from the perspective of diverse protagonists. Lowe believes this is an important tool to give us a greater and more empathetic understanding of one another.
All Photographs by Theo Moye, courtesy of Exeter Comedy Festival
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