When a short film got stretched on the rack
Violation is the kind of movie that walks into the room wearing a festival laurel wreath and dares you to say you didn’t “get it.” It’s a Canadian horror drama, a rape-revenge film dressed in art-house clothing, and it absolutely meanssomething. You can tell, because it’s grim, nonlinear, emotionally exhausting, and very pleased with its own restraint right up until it’s gleefully not restrained at all.
It’s also about 40 minutes longer than it knows what to do with, and so visually enamored with itself that the story sometimes feels like an afterthought—just a delivery vehicle for trauma, animal metaphors, and Very Important Silence.
This is less a movie you watch than one you get slowly dragged through while it whispers, “Feel bad. But also admire the framing.”
Nonlinear, nonfun, and mostly noncommunicative
The plot is simple when you line it up:
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Miriam and Caleb, an unhappy married couple, visit Miriam’s sister Greta and her husband Dylan at their secluded home.
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Miriam and Dylan share a drunken, messy, slightly flirty late-night conversation.
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Early the next morning, Dylan sexually assaults Miriam while she sleeps.
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Miriam tells Greta; Greta doesn’t believe her.
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Miriam eventually lures Dylan to a guest cabin and murders him in a brutal, prolonged way.
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She dismembers and disposes of the body.
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Later, she secretly feeds Dylan’s powdered bones to his grieving family in ice cream, while quietly falling apart.
That’s the linear version. The actual film tells this like someone dumped the timeline onto the floor and just started editing from whichever scene landed nearest their foot.
The result:
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Scenes of childhood memory, relationship strain, the assault, and the revenge are continually intercut.
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Emotional beats arrive out of order, so you rarely get to build tension or catharsis.
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Just when you think the story might be moving forward, it jumps backward to another languid shot of a forest or people silently smoking.
Nonlinear storytelling can deepen and complicate a narrative. Here, it often just makes a simple, harrowing story needlessly convoluted, like the film doesn’t entirely trust that “woman betrayed by her sister after being assaulted” is already devastating enough.
Miriam: sympathetic, yes; compelling, not always
Madeleine Sims-Fewer (also co-writer/director) plays Miriam and clearly pours everything into the performance. She’s raw, brittle, and deeply wounded—emotionally and physically. You can see the fracture lines in nearly every scene:
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The envy of Greta’s apparently stable relationship.
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The shame and confusion after the assault.
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The desperate, almost pathetic need to be believed.
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The cold determination during the revenge acts.
The problem isn’t Sims-Fewer’s acting; it’s what the film does with Miriam. It traps us inside her head, but not always in a way that feels illuminating. She’s often less a character than a manifestation of pure trauma stalked by symbolism.
We don’t get much of who she was before things went wrong, so the entire story becomes a descent from “unhappy” to “shattered and dangerous” without much contrast. It’s hard to feel the full tragedy of a fall when the movie never lets you see the ground she fell from.
Dylan: realistic predator, zero nuance
Dylan—brother-in-law, old friend, and eventual victim—is effectively horrible. The assault itself is handled in a way that’s disturbingly mundane: he starts touching her in her sleep, keeps going when she wakes and says no, and later gaslights her by rewriting the encounter as consensual.
It’s realistic. It’s ugly. It’s very well-acted. And it is absolutely not something you make jokes about, so the dark humor here is going elsewhere.
The issue: once Dylan’s role in the story is clear, he stops being anything but a target. This is not necessarily morally wrong—the film is explicit that what he did is unforgivable—but narratively, it’s not especially interesting. There’s no complexity, no sense of how he lives with himself afterward, no interrogation of his self-image beyond “I’m sure she wanted it.”
He’s an unfortunately believable type of predator; he’s also a pretty flat character. Which might be the point, but it makes the long, elaborate revenge sequence feel more like endurance theater than a reckoning with someone fully human.
The revenge: nobody asked for this much anatomy
The middle section of the film turns into an extremely detailed tutorial on how to:
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Lure someone to a secluded cabin.
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Blindfold and strip them.
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Fail to go through with suffocation.
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Kill them anyway after a messy struggle.
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Dismember the body.
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Pulverize bones with a sledgehammer.
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Dispose of everything like a very stressed-out raccoon with access to industrial bags.
It’s slow. It’s graphic. It’s meant to be uncomfortable. Mission accomplished.
But for a film that otherwise loves long pauses and meaningful silence, this sequence is strangely… indulgent. It lingers on each grisly task as though the audience showed up specifically for the Home Depot edition of How To Get Away With Murder.
While other rape-revenge films have (rightly) been criticized for turning violence into exploitation, Violation swings hard in the opposite direction: it wants you to feel how awful, messy, and traumatizing violence is. That’s a worthy goal. But after the fifteenth shot of Miriam sawing, rinsing, scrubbing, hauling, burning, and grinding, the point isn’t just made—it’s hammered in, buried, and exhumed again for one last look.
Greta: sister, skeptic, and plot device
Greta is potentially the most interesting character in the movie—Miriam’s younger sister, living what looks like a stable life with Dylan, oblivious to the danger in her bed. When Miriam confides in her about the assault, Greta:
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Refuses to believe it.
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Reframes it as Miriam trying to seduce Dylan.
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Sees it as an attack on her marriage rather than a plea for support.
That betrayal is heartbreaking and, unfortunately, realistic. But the film stops short of fully exploring Greta’s psychology—her dependence on Dylan, her perception of Miriam, her grief once he “disappears.”
By the time we get to the infamous “bone ice cream” scene—Miriam feeding Dylan’s pulverized remains to Greta and his relatives—Greta feels less like a person and more like the world’s saddest prop. We’re supposed to feel the twisted intimacy of Miriam’s act of “revenge” and “protection,” but without a fuller sense of who Greta is, it plays as chilly cruelty more than tragic complexity.
Symbolism with a sledgehammer
Subtlety is not on the menu here:
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A wolf carrying a dead rabbit after the assault.
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Creamy ice cream mixed with powdered bone.
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Miriam fantasizing about Greta hanging herself while debating the value of her marriage.
Everything means something, loudly. The film piles on imagery the way Dylan’s family piles on the dessert. If you miss the metaphors, it won’t be because the movie didn’t try; it will be because you blinked.
This overcommitment to symbolism, combined with the nonlinear fragmenting, gives the whole thing a “grad thesis on trauma with bonus gore” vibe. It’s undeniably crafted—but also relentlessly on-brand in a way that leaves little room for surprise.
Horror without release
As a horror drama, Violation does succeed in one major way: it is deeply, genuinely upsetting. There are no cheap jump scares, no cathartic “girlboss” moments, no neat arcs. The revenge doesn’t heal Miriam. It arguably destroys her further. Everyone ends up broken or deceived.
That’s honest. But it also makes the experience feel like volunteering to be emotionally waterboarded for two hours. There’s no space to breathe, no flashes of warmth beyond a few early sisterly moments, nothing to balance the bleakness except the satisfaction of recognizing a well-composed shot.
For some viewers, that will be exactly the point and exactly why they love it. For others, it will feel like being bludgeoned with a beautifully lit brick.
Final verdict: powerful, but also kind of punishing-for-sport
Violation (2020) is technically accomplished, fiercely acted, and absolutely committed to its vision. It’s also self-serious to the point of suffocation, overlong, and so in love with its own bleakness that it occasionally forgets to be a story rather than an endurance test.
As a depiction of trauma, disbelief, and the poisonous fantasy of revenge, it has real power. As a movie you might want to rewatch, it has roughly the same appeal as re-opening a wound to admire the stitches.
If you’re in the mood for brutal, art-house horror that stares directly into the abyss and then makes you help dispose of the body, this will be your thing.
If you prefer your film festival trauma with at least a whisper of balance, or you think “nonlinear bone smoothie” sounds like a bad time, you might want to violate your watchlist with something else instead.
