Review: Violation Is a Vibrantly Disorienting Examination of Trauma and Revenge

Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.

Violation
Photo: Shudder

Writer-directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation views a patch of Quebec countryside and the sky above at strange angles. The hills are unnaturally tilted and the road leading to a remote cabin is oriented across the top of the screen so that a car seems to be snaking across it upside-down. Nature is seen in uncomfortable close-up, bugs on fingernails and a wolf eating a rabbit in slow motion.

The film quickly establishes an air of tension through these images, then subsequently mirrors it in the visibly strained relationship between Miriam (Sims-Fewer) and Caleb (Obi Abili), who are traveling to visit Miriam’s sister, Greta (Anna Maguire), and her husband, Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe). Their car ride is silent, and when they take a shower together, their lack of intimacy is a marked contrast to the way that Greta and Dylan playfully paw at each other.

Following a scene where Dylan and Miriam drink alone by the fire after their respective spouses go inside for the night, the film’s presentation noticeably splinters. The timing of events becomes hard to discern, with the landscape across the bottom of the frame eerily mirrored across the top in one shot, and a river flowing backward in another, all against the sort of strings and distorted sounds that portend an approaching catastrophe—or one that’s already occurred.

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In this way, Violation pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film by shuffling its timeline to the point where the act of revenge is presented before the inciting incident. Only later do we get the scene where Miriam awakens in the morning beside the smoldering fire and Dylan forcing himself on her.

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Violation teems with lived-in details, as in the way the characters fall back into familiar dynamics as though no time has passed since they last saw each other. The film’s structure uses these dynamics as a base to disorient our understanding of the characters—from Miriam and Dylan’s initially playful chemistry to Greta’s fond remembrances of youth, such as the way her father used to swing an axe to chop firewood—and muddle what emotional responses correspond to which events. Greta and Miriam will be mad at each other, but siblings are always sniping at each other that way, effortlessly able to get under one another’s skin. Greta disdainfully remarks that Miriam has long been her “white knight,” with a history of going out of her way to protect her sister in ways that Greta finds largely self-serving. We connect this to other scenes, like Miriam trapping a spider beneath a glass to keep Caleb from killing it only to forget about the spider and find it dead in the morning, suffocated.

Though Miriam’s rape is presented in extreme close-up as a disorienting tangle of limbs, the violence she enacts on Dylan is as gruesome as it is unambiguous. There’s some question of whether or not she’s defending Greta from a man she doesn’t deem good enough for her, as well as how reliable that perception may even be. At one point, Greta goes so far as to accuse Miriam of creating “a reality different from everyone else’s” in her head. For much of Violation, we’re unable to clearly trace Miriam’s state of mind, and so we feel alienated from her, the apprehension on her face open to all sorts of meanings as she seemingly lures Dylan into an affair. And while revenge is a dish that’s often satisfyingly served in films such as this, there’s a pervasive disorientation and uncertainty at play here that makes what Miriam does to Dylan feel truly uncomfortable, especially considering the duration of the act of revenge.

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Violation’s timeline of events can be confusing to the point of disengagement, what with our needing to orient ourselves based on differing haircuts and grasp that a briefly glimpsed object early on will play an important role later in the narrative. The film is also far from subtle, given its propensity for screeching music and heavy-handed animal metaphors. But as Violation goes on, it cleverly reconfigures our relationship to its style and aesthetics as our understanding of the story’s events slowly evolve. The music’s overbearing quality starts to feel intentional, and the predator/prey metaphors become multifaceted, alternately representing how Miriam sees herself as well as what she worries might be true: Hunting is nourishment for some and sport for others, catharsis neither inherent nor guaranteed.

Score: 
 Cast: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili  Director: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli  Screenwriter: Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Dusty Mancinelli  Distributor: Shudder  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: R  Year: 2020

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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