This is a film that doesn’t do niceties, so let’s be blunt: to donkey punch is to hit a woman on the back of the neck while shagging her from behind, the resultant muscle spasm ensuring the man’s orgasm is, shall we say, forcibly milked.
It was at a party that director Olly Blackburn first heard about the (apocryphal, one trusts) art. “I was, like… holy shit!” he exclaims in the so-so Making Of. Jaime Winstone hadn’t heard of it either… and nor had her pa. “My dad said, ‘There’s not a donkey in it, is there?’” she laughs.
Blackburn’s thriller pivots on the titular strike - viciously executed during an orgy aboard a yacht - and the queasy brutality of the moment is serviced by the chokingly
ominous tone preceding it.
Sadly the remainder of the movie unravels even as it escalates, the teenagers’ journey into violence skidding from horrific to ho-hum.
Jamie Graham
