“What have you learned?”
“I’m capable of cruelty.”

It’s easy to say that VIOLATION is a revenge story. When the dust settles, it’s the tale of (yes) a violation, and how that violation prompts vengeance. However to say that VIOLATION is only a revenge story is selling it short.

VIOLATION is a story of a wide complexity of human emotions. Malice, disgust, betrayal, anguish, denial, coping, fastidiousness, disappointment, trauma, protectiveness, and even love are all on display before the lights come up on this new project by the directing team of Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer (who also stars in the movie).

VIOLATION skips around in time but focuses on two couples. On a cottage weekend like most others, Miriam and Caleb (Sims-Fewer and Obi Abili) venture out to a lakehouse with Miriam’s sister and brother-in-law, Greta and Dylan (Anna Maguire and Jesse LaVercombe). There’s talking, there’s drinking, there’s a campfire. After the sun goes down, the vulnerability and emotional honesty come up.

Then there is a violation – one that must be answered for, one way or another.

The quote mentioned above is declared by Greta late in the story, in reference to what she learned about herself the first time that she snared and skinned a rabbit. She expounds that it was a situation she put herself into knowing that it would be upsetting and unpleasant, but that she wanted to prove that she could see such a task through. At that moment, VIOLATION posits that we don’t truly know what we’re capable of. We may believe that we are capable of making a stand, raising our voice, throwing a punch…but do we really know?

The stories we have consumed have filled many of us with feelings of bravado – that anyone could pull a trigger, swing an axe, get our hands bloody. In the name of our children, our homes, our way of life, or our very survival – we all believe that we can rise when the moment comes. But what is the cost?

How many tears would fall? How long might we freeze? How tempted might we be to back-out midway through? What nightmares would we plant in our own psyche? Would we ever be “ourselves” again?

These introspections are the real power of VIOLATION. It has no interest in being one more genre film about a victim who rises-up; it wants us to think long and hard about what is truly involved with rising-up. This film knows full-well how many video games we’ve played, how many zombies movies we’ve watched, and how much bar-boasting we have done.

It wants us to step into the most skin-crawling, soul-shattering point-of-no-return imaginable and prove to ourselves just what we are capable of…if we’re capable of anything.