Variations on Violence

Directed by Zachary Nichols

Johnny and Mary are siblings bound together through childhood abandonment, scraping by in a dead-end rural town. Johnny, a military drone pilot, executes killings by day and returns each night to a home already hollowed out. Brutal visions of the battlefields he surveils invade his life, repeating and distorting without release. Mary—abrasive, funny, and fiercely protective—dates indiscriminately, holding their shared life together through sheer force of will. When Johnny dies by suicide, reality shifts into an abstract afterlife, where personal guilt is stripped of its human scale and dissolved into something vast and impersonal.