SXSW Film Review: Violation

Ill-omen hangs like a cloud over the weekend when sisters Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer) and Greta (Anna Maguire) go for a weekend away. Miriam is guarded, brusque with husband Caleb (Obi Abili) in the car there, while old jealousies and frictions are inflamed in Greta's spouse, Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe).

Something has to fracture, and this is before the interspersed moments of Miriam in a black wig, soaked in rain, bug-eyed and staring, inwardly and outwardly changed, are given their hideous context.

Violation, which plays this week as a SXSW Festival Favorite before arriving on streaming horror platform Shudder, doesn't start off as a gory, unhinged, and violent shocker. With that vague sense of unease in middle-class relationships, Violation begins as a successor to Mike Leigh's early portraits of the little lives of the barely bourgeoisie. Yet one disgusting act sends it back three centuries, into the waiting, bloody arms of a much older form - the Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, with it bloody, amorality, and whole continents of kingdoms left blind from that eye-for-an-eye mentality. In this, it almost feels like a rebuttal to Promising Young Woman and its resolution, both overly-convoluted and simplistic. Violation, much like Brea Grant's Lucky, strikes hard at the heart of the impossibility of revenge.

In her elegantly-structured script, writer/director Sims-Fewer rejects the idea of a revelation changing the perspective on a moment we have already seen. Instead, she contextualizes what we are to see. When the pivotal moment, the titular violation, finally occurs we are already in possession of all the information we need for how bleak events will become. Miriam's victimhood is made plain, but Sims-Fewer adds so many complications, detail, nuances, contexts that increasingly, quietly, foreshadow the unexpected cruelty and flashes of grisly violence. In her contribution to the ever-swelling canon of feminist revenge dramas, Sims-Fewer goes back to the Jacobean taste for the grand guignol, a sensibility inherited directly from their ancient Greek antecedents.

There is never a moment when a character performs an action that changes how we think of them: instead, Sims-Fewer has told us exactly who they are, and while we should be appalled we should never be shocked.

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Violation

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