Film review: Violation takes an uncompromising look at betrayal and revenge
It’s bracing to see a female-centred film this uncompromising, posing such hard questions
Miriam Sims-Frewer puts in a raw and fearless performance as a woman betrayed and bent on revenge.
Violation is now streaming via VIFF Connect.
MORE THAN living up to its title, Violation features several deeply disturbing acts of betrayal.
The film itself violates expectations and conventions—from the way sexual assault is portrayed to how it recasts revenge as anything but cathartic release. It upends the graphic exploitation of old grindhouse movies like The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave.
If you can stomach it, prepare to be implicated in the process. And be left with something to argue about for hours—or days.
Writer-directors Madeleine Sims-Frewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s stomach-churningly unsettling story about a lakeside getaway gone wrong made justifiable buzz on the festival circuit. The most striking aspect is the aesthetic allure—a look that’s at interesting odds with the more grisly and graphic moments.
Violation takes place at a lakeside cottage, amid lush deciduous forest. The narrative structure is nonchronological and fractured, so our clue to time becomes the seasons: a leafy green summer; the angry orange-red foliage of fall. At times, cinematographer Adam Crosby warps, inverts, and creates mirror images of the landscape to reflect the mental disarray of the central character, Miriam (Sims-Frewer pulling triple duty). At others, he imbues hazy, colour-saturated handheld scenes with a hallucinatory feel. Heavy visual metaphors abound, including a Brothers Grimm-worthy black wolf preying on a rabbit. Extreme closeups have an eerie expressive power, whether it’s the hairs raising on the back of an agitated person’s neck, or dirty fingers pressing down on a pale shoulder.
Andrea Boccadoro’s score, loaded with swelling strings, washes every interaction with a sense of doom—even before things get ugly. In all, Violation is incredibly assured for a first feature.
The back-and-forth structure allows for opposing versions of the central trauma. The small difference between the phrase “Don’t. Stop.” and “Don’t stop.” becomes monumental.
In Violation, Miriam has flown in from London with her husband Caleb (Obi Abili) to visit her sister Greta (Anna Maguire) and her spouse Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe) at the idyllic lakeside retreat. Miriam finds it difficult to talk to the distant Caleb but easy to share her insecurities with Dylan, who also happens to be an old school friend. Through extended conversations, we start to chart out the complex psychological dynamic. Greta considers Miriam controlling. Dylan has pulled Greta out from her sister’s protective wing. And Miriam is—what? Jealous? Resentful?—of the other pair’s easy sexual chemistry.
We won’t reveal the trauma that ensues. But on one if its most powerful levels, in this #MeToo moment, Violation exposes the risks around disclosing abuse. The film also takes commendable pains not to sexualize assault, its aesthetic choices echoing those of the recent film Test Pattern.
Still, Violation doesn’t make picking sides easy, on a personal or political level. In a fearlessly soul-baring, raw performance, Miriam is enigmatic and not always easy to like: “I guess we’re just both fucking awful people,” she says to Dylan at one point. Further complicating our expectations is that the film’s most predatory character has likable qualities.
Sims-Frewer and Manicelli refuse to provide release or resolution, right to Violation’s last moment—a fact that will by turns frustrate and alienate some viewers. The denouement, with a final transgression of Greek-tragedy proportions, perhaps goes too far. But it raises even more questions about what we’ve just witnessed. An extreme portrait of trauma-induced breakdown? A cautionary tale about collective female rage? An amoral world as black as that of any conjured by Michael Haneke?
It’s bracing—and frankly, refreshing—to see a female-centred film this uncompromising ask such hard questions. None of it is easy to watch, but that’s partly because the film makes us look uncomfortably at what’s right and what’s wrong—and whether it makes a difference when a man or a woman is violator, or violated. It’s an “anti-revenge” film, as the directors have dubbed it, that asks whether unforgivable acts justify, well, really unforgivable acts.
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