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Honey Bunch opens with Diana (Grace Glowicki) waking from a coma so deep she can’t recall her own name. Her husband, Homer (Ben Petrie), has arranged for an experimental regimen at a remote clinic—think strobing lights in a manor house that could double as a funhouse of forgotten dreams.

Mancinelli and Sims-Fewer channel the spirit of Seventies psychological horror, where every zoomed-in portrait and hushed corridor implies an unspoken threat. Adam Crosby’s lens bathes rooms in a muted haze, suggesting that reality itself might be on the treatment table.

At its center lies a trio of questions: What becomes of identity when memory unravels? Can love survive the bleaching away of shared history? And who holds the right to reconstruct a person?

The film’s premise feels almost outrageous—an ode to both experimental psychiatry and marital codependency—but it gains gravity from its philosophical underpinnings. Is...

2021 SXSW Violation Review — Violation (2020) Video Movie Review from the 28th Annual South By Southwest Film Festival, a movie directed by Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, and stars Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse Lavercombe, Obi Abili, Jasmin Geljo, and Cynthia Ashperger. Crew Andrea Boccadoro created the music for the film. Adam Crosby crafted the [...]

Continue reading: Video Movie Review: Violation: A Dark, Self-serious Revenge Film that Benefits from its Heroine & Sequencing [SXSW 2021]...

Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s domestic horror debut Violation follows Miriam (played by Sims-Fewer), a fraught woman on the verge of divorce, returns home to visit her sister and her husband at their lake home. The trip takes a dark turn when Dylan assaults Miriam, sending her on a violent arc of revenge. Dp Adam Crosby tells us how he captured the film’s lurid takes and how they fostered an environment to explore sensitive topics. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired […]

The post "The Overall Emotional Responsibility of the Film Was a Daunting Task at Times": Dp Adam Crosby on Violation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s domestic horror debut Violation follows Miriam (played by Sims-Fewer), a fraught woman on the verge of divorce, returns home to visit her sister and her husband at their lake home. The trip takes a dark turn when Dylan assaults Miriam, sending her on a violent arc of revenge. Dp Adam Crosby tells us how he captured the film’s lurid takes and how they fostered an environment to explore sensitive topics. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired […]

The post "The Overall Emotional Responsibility of the Film Was a Daunting Task at Times": Dp Adam Crosby on Violation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Editor’s note: The following review contains spoilers for the ending of “Violation.”

In their Master Class during 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, “Transparent” creator Joey Soloway posits that the female gaze, a term originated by film theorist Laura Mulvey, should not strive to be the direct inverse of the male gaze. While women, trans, and non-binary filmmakers are well within their rights to subvert conventional norms around nudity, sexuality, and the framing of bodies, a truly “other gaze” (Soloway’s inclusive amendment of the term) should aim to create new imagery outside of established cinematic tropes. That brings us to Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s unflinchingly grotesque “Violation,” which hammers the bluntest of female gazes into the rape-revenge thriller. Rich in sumptuous visuals that portend its nasty undercurrent,

A resolutely disturbing genre thriller, it opens with the ominous image of a pitch black wolf feasting on a rabbit carcass...

You know something terrible is going to happen when the early moments of a film greets you with an obvious reference to “The Shining” — in the case of the time-and-memory-twisting psychological horror “Violation,” the bird’s-eye view of a lone car, creeping ahead on a narrow road through dense trees, accompanied by a screechy score. What you won’t realize in the hair-raising feature debut by filmmaking duo Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli is just how much worse things will turn out to be than what this signposting might prepare you for.

A chamber piece with the existential mood of Lars von Trier, as well as a trope-defying revenge thriller with a mounting sense of terror, the dismembering, blood-draining frights of “Violation” — from tense familial grudges to an awful case of sexual assault and gaslighting that leads to brutal vengeance — aren’t easy to shake or describe. Suffice it to...