VIOLATION filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli break down their “anti-revenge” feature debut

After making the festival rounds since last fall, Violation, the uncompromisingly visceral and strikingly beautiful twist on the rape-revenge genre, is finally available to view at home.

Written, produced, and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, Violation is a deeply unsettling examination of the effects of trauma and assault and the spiraling desire for revenge.

As Violation opens, Miriam (Sims-Fewer) and her partner Caleb (Obi Abili) are traveling to visit her sister Greta (Anna Maguire) and her husband Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe) at a rustic, secluded cabin. Miriam is trying to repair her relationship with Greta, and the idyllic country setting seems like the perfect opportunity to spend some quality time with her sister.

After a long night of drinking and chatting by the fire, Miriam wakes up in the midst of a sexual assault by Dylan, her sister’s seemingly easygoing husband. What follows is a descent into the deepest pit of trauma and violence, as Miriam begins concocting a revenge plot that will shake her sense of self and her relationship with her sister to the very core.

Stunningly shot in the Quebec countryside using only natural night, Violation balances moments of striking violence with images of pure untapped natural beauty, asking viewers to question how far they would go for revenge and what that says about our own notions of evolution and morality.

We caught up with Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli to discuss the reception of their divisive film, their very personal connections to the material, and the inspirations behind their “anti-revenge” film.

Violation is available to rent now via the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox and will be available through the VIFF Connect Virtual Theatre as of March 26. Violation will also be available on the Shudder streaming service as of March 26.

Bad Feeling Magazine: How did Violation come together? What made this the right project for your first feature?

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: The two of us met at TIFF in 2015, we were both filmmakers, part of the TIFF Filmmaker Lab. And we actually had gone to university together at the same time, but never met each other. We were a year apart and just didn’t cross paths. But we met at the right time, when we were both kind of looking for a collaborator.

Dusty Mancinelli: So we decided to go back and do our Masters of Film Production at York. And it was there that we started collaborating together. And we directed and wrote some shorts there. And we really, for the first time, enjoyed the process of making a film and not just having made something.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It had been very stressful. We kind of bonded over how stressful we found filmmaking. Even though we loved it so much, we loved the end result. But we didn’t necessarily love the making of the film until we started working together. And then we realized, “Oh, it can actually be enjoyable.”

Dusty Mancinelli: I think when we made our second short, Woman in Stall, it was then that we realized, hey, let’s just join forces, this is working so well. And let’s just exclusively work together as this writing, directing, and producing duo, and that’s when we actually started writing Violation. All of our shorts deal with very similar topics and themes, power dynamics between men and women, abuse of power, trauma. And our friendship was born out of our own shared histories of abuse and trauma in our past.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It was a light start to a friendship!

Dusty Mancinelli It took three years to make this movie. And so you have to really care about it to make it for that long. We were really interested in making a film about trauma and post-traumatic stress and what happens to your body when you’re reliving these kind of traumatic episodes. And we really were focused on trying to create a visceral experience for an audience, we kind of recognized that not everyone’s gone through an experience or episode of abuse and trauma, but how can we safely transport an audience who hasn’t, so they can maybe empathize with someone who has? And that was really the goal with the movie.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: Yeah, I think at the beginning we really wanted to make a revenge film that didn’t celebrate revenge. Not that we don’t enjoy those films, I think we enjoy them quite a bit. But there’s something very divorced from reality. And we wanted to look at the grounded true nature of what would happen if you were wronged. And then you decided the only recourse was revenge. And what does that really look like? How does it erode and degrade your morality and your humanity?

Yeah, so in many ways, this is an anti-revenge film. And it’s a cautionary tale that really shows you the destructive nature of revenge. And the toll it takes.

What kind of responses have you been getting to the film from audiences so far?

Dusty Mancinelli: So far, it’s overwhelmingly positive. It’s definitely a divisive movie. There are things about it that rub some people the wrong way. And full-frontal male nudity, it turns out, is not something a lot of people are open to.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: Something that shocked us actually, is the response to the violence because there are only two real moments of extreme gore in the film. But they’re shot in [wide shots].

It’s interesting, too, because some of the films that have impacted me the most, or that I’ve thought about the most, are films that I initially really hated, or had a really kind of visceral, violent response to, where I left the cinema thinking, “that was fucking awful.” And we hope that the same thing will potentially happen — that some people will despise it, and then maybe think a bit more about why they despise it so much.

How did you come about developing the relationship between Dylan and Miriam? It’s so nuanced and complicated, and it’s really unexpected.

Dusty Mancinelli: When we were thinking about our own experiences of trauma and abuse in our past, we noticed that a lot of films that deal with this weren’t reflecting our own experiences, which were often…and it’s funny, we wrote this during the #MeToo movement when a lot of people started sharing their stories. And it was at that time when you started to notice a lot of victims of sexual abuse, it’s the result of someone in their close circle. It’s either family, a friend, or a loved one they trusted. And we weren’t really seeing a lot of that portrayed — if you think about Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and other films like that, there’s the stranger in the alleyway, the nefarious villain, obviously someone who’s bad, but it just didn’t represent what we were seeing or experiencing. And so for Dylan, we wanted to try to create that complexity. He’s an affable, charming person. They have a really unique bond.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: And a shared history. They were best friends as kids.

Dylan’s gaslighting attempt really stands out in the film, it’s not an element you often see in rape-revenge films.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: Actually, that was the scene that we worked on the most in the script, because it was so delicate, that balance between him convincing himself that he’s innocent, and at the same time trying to make her believe that she is guilty. It was really tough to get that right. So we worked on that a lot ourselves. And then again, when Jesse came in, we workshopped it with him a lot. Just breaking it down, the motivation of every single line.

Dusty Mancinelli: And there’s something really tragic about that scene. You feel that as an audience, if he had just not gaslight her, if he had just accepted an acknowledgment, she gave him an out, we can work this out. So there’s this open door there. And I think the tragedy is that the next scene is you see him being strung up. And so it’s this inevitable conclusion of what happens when you don’t own or acknowledge what you’ve done to someone. So I think that duality was also very integral for us.

Madeleine, from a performance standpoint, what was the most challenging aspect of this film for you? It’s such a visceral performance in so many ways, and there’s actually a lot of physical acting that I noticed on the second viewing that I missed the first time because I was just so involved in the storyline.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: I think that in terms of the physical difficulty, I think the scene where we’re swimming in the lake was incredibly physically demanding for me. I was not prepared for how cold it was going to be, and how long we were going to be in that lake. So that was really tough.

I think I went very, very deeply into the emotional side of the character. And I don’t think I would have been able to do that if we didn’t have the crew that we had. I think the emotional scenes were the hardest scenes for me, I wanted to pay credence to what Miriam’s really gone through. And it was so personal to me. And there were very dark things that I was kind of mining for the role.

Dusty Mancinelli: But I don’t think you or I were prepared for the kind of residual effects that would have on you. It was such a troubling role that it stayed with you. And it was just so upsetting. Because you were reliving a lot of those real emotions for so long. It’s such a horrific thing to have literally experienced those emotions for two full months.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: And even just on set. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone would go back and we’d all have dinner together. And I’d have just gone through this horrendous, traumatic scene, and now I have to eat dinner. And I was trying not to cry during dinner.  I’m just so happy that we had the team we had.

The film is really quite beautiful — could you talk about the stylistic choices that went into Violation? Using the natural light and the nature elements of the film and how they link together with the central storyline?

Dusty Mancinelli: We were just really inspired by this idea of creating a look that felt like a fairy tale, that there’s this heightened quality to it, it’s kind of gorgeous but terrifying at the same time.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: And there’s something so dangerous and powerful and beautiful about nature and being surrounded by nature and the character, the whole film kind of exists in this vortex of nature, there are no other people really that you see other than the couple at the end. It’s just kind of this almost snow globe feeling, which is what we really wanted to create.

Dusty Mancinelli: And there’s a really interesting duality, the film is really asking you a lot of questions about what is right and what is wrong. And when we look at nature, we don’t impose those questions on nature, when we see a wolf tearing apart the stomach of a rabbit, that’s normal in that world. And so that was exciting and interesting to us, that we’re seeing something horrific in nature, yet somewhat beautiful. And we’re contrasting that with these really complex questions about our own morality as a species. Are we that different from the natural world as we claim to be? So that’s really an interesting question I think the film asks as we watch this woman lose her humanity.

In terms of the character, filmmakers or writers often want their characters to be fully sympathetic at all times, and that can be problematic in certain cases. Was that an issue for you? Did you want the audience to be kept on their toes about where their loyalties should lie?

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: Yeah, we definitely talked about and thought about that a lot. Because we knew that she, especially in the beginning, is not sympathetic at all. And something very interesting for us to raise and talk about is that something bad, something awful, and disturbing, and unfair, can happen to a person, even if they’re not a perfect person. So we wanted to challenge the people watching and in thinking about the ways we kind of have a binary, black and white thinking about victims as innocent, sweet kind people and the perpetrators of sexual violence are these cruel, evil, brutish men. I think it was more important for us to show Miriam as being complex and imperfect, rather than have her be fully sympathetic at the beginning.

Dusty Mancinelli: And we’re also just so used to seeing the male antihero story, but there aren’t many female antihero stories. And I think that was a really interesting thing for us that we really wanted to explore. And I think what we’ve noticed in terms of the response is that female antiheroes are judged more harshly by audiences, both men and women, for the things that they do.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: I think we romanticize male antiheroes in a way that people don’t with female antiheroes, like I remember watching Bad Lieutenant and Taxi Driver and just loving those characters. They’re horrible people, but they’re captivating, and they’re interesting, and you root for them anyway.

Have you begun thinking about our next project next? Do you think it’s going to be something in the same vein, or are you going to unleash a comedy into the world next year to balance things out?

Dusty Mancinelli: We’re writing two things. We’re running a dark comedy. We’re also writing a mystery thriller.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: It’s funny that you ask, because, yes, the second script we started working on was a comedy!

Dusty Mancinelli: We have such a wide range of tastes as filmmakers and just audience members. And we both challenge each other when we come up with ideas in ways that I think allows us to hopefully be very malleable when we start making work, and I think it’s really important for us that we don’t get pigeonholed or put into a box because it’s very easy, we’re noticing just with what people send us now. It’s like, we’re just that now, right? We’re what you just saw, we’re that kind of filmmaker, and so it’s really important just to showcase all the different things that we love.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer: Although there are still through lines and thematic things that are in both of these projects that I think are very us.

Dusty Mancinelli: And there’s a time travel movie that we’ve been writing for five years. And one day, hopefully, someone will give us a ton of money to make this epic, crazy time travel thing.

Violation is available to rent now via the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox and will be available through the VIFF Connect Virtual Theatre as of March 26. Violation will also be available on the Shudder streaming service as of March 26.