Violation is a revenge thriller, but not of the variety you typically see. Through their own personal experiences, coupled with talking to others, co-writers/co-directors Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli pinpointed a disconnect between how sexual assault narratives typically play out in film, and in reality.
“What we’re used to seeing within this sub-genre of rape revenge films is the very obvious villain — a stranger in an alley like in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible — who’s so vicious and violent,” Mancinelli says. “And while those do occur, we noticed just from our own personal experiences with sexual abuse and trauma, and once we started talking about our own stories, how many people we knew in our life — friends and family who had also experienced something very similar — that more often than not, the perpetrator was someone you cared about, someone you trusted, someone who wasn’t this stranger in an alleyway.”
Violation‘s storytelling is intentionally fragmented, and Mancinelli says that is to put you in the frame of mind of the main character, Miriam, played by Sims-Fewer.
“We’re trying to create a sense of disorientation that simulates what it’s like for Miriam, who’s coping with this trauma,” he says. “So hopefully, you feel as fragmented as she feels. And as you’re putting the pieces of the story together, you’re starting to see her emotional, psychological unraveling, and the structure of the narrative is that we see her slowly descend into a point where she’s completely corroded her morality and she’s compromised all of her relationships.”
It was also important that this trauma not transform Miriam into someone unrecognizable to an audience.
“When we were writing it, we kept saying to each other, ‘She’s not Dexter.’ She isn’t this crazy killer and she doesn’t even know if she can go through with it,” Sims-Fewer says. “She’s planned it out—as I think probably a lot of people who fantasize about revenge perhaps lie in bed at night and plan out a way that they could get their revenge. But when it comes to the actual thing, she doesn’t know if she’s capable.”
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