"VIOLATION": Socially Distanced Cinema at Paradise Theatre

PETER KUPLOWSKY wrote the following when VIOLATION was featured in the Official Selection for the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival:

Since 2017, writer-director duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli have provocatively probed many a moral boundary in their award-winning short films, which often scrutinize the emotional stresses of characters who are confronted by acts of transgression. Their remarkable debut feature, Violation, is another étude of disturbed psychology — but this time, it’s ratched into a hypnotic horror register.

Sims-Fewer herself achingly portrays Miriam, a woman treading water in an unhappy marriage who hopes to find solace in a weekend reunion with her estranged younger sister, Greta (Anna Maguire), at a secluded cottage estate. Along with their respective husbands, Miriam’s brooding partner Caleb (Obi Abili) and Greta’s affable Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe), they find themselves navigating a minefield of one another’s sensitivies and histories, culminating in a traumatic series of betrayals — the root of which is a deeply upsetting act of sexual violence.

Abandoning the linear plotlines and conventional catharsis of archetypal revenge thrillers, Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer recognize that some horrors cannot be so easily exorcised or reconciled. Photographed with a nervous and haptic intimacy that methodically gives way to interludes of startling surrealism and riveting suspense, Violation is a thousand-yard stare into human cruelty.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Paradise Theatre, 1006c Bloor Street West, Toronto, Canada