CHICAGO — In the 2021 indie drama “Violet” from writer-director Justine Bateman (which had a limited release in theaters last fall), a Hollywood development executive played by Olivia Munn experiences intrusive thoughts and self-doubt as she goes about her daily life. On the surface, Violet seemingly has it all: Beauty, a job that she’s good at and a hunky best friend who seems interested in more. But her colleagues and acquaintances are none the wiser to her quietly unrelenting inner turmoil, which manifests on screen in different forms: Sometimes it’s a running monologue of negativity in her head (voiced by Justin Theroux), sometimes the sentiments are more plaintive (arriving in the form of handwriting words on screen, as if a journal come to life) and sometimes we simply witness everything fade to red as Violet becomes overwhelmed by the moment.
Part low-key satire of the movie business, part psychological portrait of a woman gradually finding a way to push through her anxieties, “Violet” is the directorial debut of Bateman, who initially established her career as an actor, notably on the 1980s TV comedy “Family Ties.” She is a producer here as well and will be screening the film Thursday at Northwestern University as part of an ongoing schedule of events organized by the new Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Creation of Mental Health via Cinematic Art, a program aimed at encouraging aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters think about issues around mental health — specifically how it is portrayed on screen — in a more nuanced way. Public events in the coming months include a lecture on the depictions of women with bipolar disorder, another on portrayals of disassociation and yet another that examines the ways race is often equated with trauma in pop culture.
Bateman, however, was adamant when we spoke that, “For me, the film is not about mental health at all. It’s just about the human condition, and are you making decisions out of fear or out of instinct? Because I do believe we all inherently have a guiding instinct within us and that fear can obscure our feeling of connection with that instinct. So that’s where I’m coming from. I don’t know about mental health, I’m not in the mental health conversation. I don’t have anything to do with that.”
