Review: Violet (2021)
That interior critic that tells you you're not good enough has a starring role in this feminist drama
Violet (2021)
Written and directed by Justine Bateman
Many people — most? — almost everyone? — have a negative voice of some kind inside them. Some people literally hear it speaking, telling them they’ll never be any good To others, it’s like a movie always playing in the next room, a movie that makes you feel like shit but that you can’t help hearing and seeing all the time. And sometimes it plays on the ceiling above your bed.
Violet (Olivia Munn), an executive with an independent movie studio, hears this voice whenever she’s challenged by the studio CEO, Rick (Todd Stashwick); in fact, she hears it when anyone at work talks to her, even the callow script readers who report to her. The Voice tells her to let everyone walk all over her; if she doesn’t give everyone what they ask, they’ll know she’s the same selfish little baby her older brother and her mother always said she was.
The movie’s narrative is simple, really. It parallels the standard addiction-to-recovery story you see in many movies, with the first act showing the protagonist hitting bottom, then climbing out. But here, instead of alcohol or drugs, the main character starts out addicted to her inner critic and can’t let go of it.
When we hear the Voice (Justin Theroux), we immediately understand what’s happening, that it’s her interior critic. But writer-director Justine Bateman (yes, from the TV series “Family Ties”) wants to show how it affects Violet in every aspect of her life: work, friendships, sex, and especially in relations with her birth family from whom it springs. These sequences are painful to watch and hear, and some viewers may find them unbearable if the depiction of the interior critic hits too personally.
Then Violet begins to turn away from the Voice — or, as she names it, “the committee in my head.” After putting down a former lover in a chance meeting, she comes home feeling crushed and exhausted. Even though the Voice told her to rudely lash out at the innocent man, she doesn’t like herself when she’s like that. She dares to tell her housemate Red — a large, handsome man played by Luke Bracey — what really happened in the encounter even as the Voice is shouting at her not to tell the truth, that he’ll think she’s weird or unbalanced or something.
Red is, of course, prime relationship material. A decent man who’s sharing a temporary home with her while his own house is being remodeled, he provides the perfect balance between concerned friend and future husband. After telling Red the truth, Violet sees a glint of light shining into the dark well of paranoia and dysfunction where she lives with the voice. When she begins defying the Voice more and more, she feels more free.

At this point, Bateman chose to represent her contra-Voice with a visual device, titles that appear as a sort of overlay to the screen image. I LIKE MYSELF THIS WAY, we read as Violet makes yet another small choice to defy the Voice. That this contra-Voice is represented using a girly cursive font that makes the film momentarily seem like an ad for dietary supplements is an esthetic choice I disliked. But clearly Bateman is trying to make her feminist message as palatable as possible to the young straight women who see themselves in Violet.
The most significant things about this film are that “Violet” is Justine Bateman’s directorial review and that she chose this implicitly feminist (yet moderately so) theme. The 2021 release date suggests to me not that it was made during the pandemic, but that it is one of the many minor films pushed out by studios to fill the void that the pandemic produced. How long it sat in the can until its 2021 release, I don’t know. But if you’re not too triggered by the negative Voice, it’s watchable.