I hate cautionary tales—I always root for the villain. 

Unabashedly afflicted and ruthless in their pursuits, morally flawed minds yield a rare power of conviction that delights me. Hannibal Lecter, the Joker, Patrick Bateman, I adore them all—but they’re pussies, relatively speaking. Fucked up women excite me more. They’re scarier. From the holy trinity—Ursula, Maleficent, Cruella de Vil—to Beatrix Kiddo and Cersei Lannister, I love how conflicted I feel as they drag me into the nadir. The spectacle of female iniquity on screen makes me consider my own potential, how extreme I would descend, were I in their shoes. Can something so compelling, so relatable, so delicious, really be reduced so simplistically—to “bad”?

I believe that cinema rarely bestows female depravity the gory dimensionality it deserves because violent women force society to confront a disconcerting fact: we are just as dangerous as men, if not more so. That our mothers, sisters, lovers are capable of hurting us—that I, we, ourselves as women, can commit serious harm—is so existentially terrifying, we’ve banished the thought to the deepest pit of our collective unconscious.

MARASCHINO conjures it up and forces us to deal with it, telling the outrageous, triumphant, gleefully disturbed journey of a centerfold who must unify her fractured sense of self by embracing the brutality of her Id to earn her poisoned cake and eat it, too. 

It was important to me to imbue Bunny with that particular irony every woman has learned to navigate, taking full satirical advantage of female stereotypes by draping them in the garb of Neo-noir. The intention is to literally flip the script on violence against women to one on the glories of female rage—without superficially empowering someone who does not deserve our blind adoration, or, possibly, any at all. We don’t root for Bunny because she murders her lover’s wife and imprisons him a gimp. We do it  because she’s found the gumption to take what she wants: for him to stay, by any means. Whether you still want to love her after the credits roll is entirely up to you. 

This film is not a contrived, superficial statement about a discarded woman who “takes her power back”—to use what is sadly becoming a vapid phrase. It’s a story about devotion, “hysteria,” control and insecurity. It’s about loneliness, and that invisible line between obsession and true love, requited or not. Most of all, it's a justification for the existence of female violence per se, with all of its deliciously problematic implications. 

Bunny is no hero, but we understand her all the same, because darkness lurks in all of us. It feeds when we live vicariously through someone like her. There’s something wholesome about acknowledging that darkness, and giving it permission to exist.

Is MARASCHINO a cautionary tale? Perhaps. But it isn’t for pussies.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  —Alyssa Cody Garcia