An intense watch of high stakes and potent filmmaking, Avarice hits the bullseye as a strong new entry in the home invasion movie canon.

Directed by John V. Soto (The Gateway), Avarice stars Gillian Alexy as Kate, a world champion archer who, while on a much-needed holiday with her investment banker husband Ash (Luke Ford) and their teenage daughter Sarah (Tea Heathcote-Marks), is subjected to a terrifying home invasion by a group of mercenaries. Kate must use her skills and cunning to outwit her captors and save her family.

The “particular set of skills” that Kate employs is that of an Olympic qualifying archer. The bow-and-arrow is a weapon featured prominently in action movies, often to fantastical results in films such as The Avengers and Hunger Games, with arrows fired in all directions and hitting impossible targets with the flick of a wrist.

Soto doesn’t pay such fancy tricks here. In Avarice, the bow-and-arrow has weight, speed, and a thudding frankness of finality when Kate hits her targets, of which there are many. The grounding of the film’s violence heightens the stakes, and the mercenary villains are intimidating, especially lead baddie Reed whose sadistic relish at the bloodshed of her making is convincingly portrayed by Alexandra Nell.

Gillian Alexy counters with an engrossing turn as an everyday woman pushed into a life-or-death situation, only to flip the tables on her captors. Soto thankfully doesn’t incorporate any of the usual gymnastic martial arts nonsense that every action heroine utilises these days in one capacity or another. Kate isn’t a superhero; she just does what she knows best. As one bad guy says in Avarice: “Don’t mess around! She’s a trained archer.”

Soto, through his use of POV action shots and high-stakes tension, has created an indie Aussie thriller that succeeds as a genre film with depth. Four years in the making, Avarice hits its mark.