‘Me And My Victim’ Review – A Sickening Examination Of Disturbing Encounters [Fantasia Fest 2024]

Content Warning: This review concerns depictions of sexual assault that are outlined in detail in the film described below. Help is available for those experiencing sexual assault at the hands of a friend, family member, or partner. Call the 24-hour National Sex Assault Hotline to speak to someone and be heard: 1-800-656-4673

Me and My Victim is a mirror held against its creator, in this case, the only person who admits to being its creator, Billy Pedlow. What Pedlow aims to do with his so-called collaborative work with Maurane, with whom he shares the proverbial stage with here, is use the recounting of his and her actions as a springboard to examine the morality of human life through art and actions we take outside of it and because of it. Pedlow frames his relationship with Maurane as a complex one, and this is undoubtedly true. But as this project goes on it becomes quite clear that Pedlow is the one who has complicated it.

Pedlow is a poet living in New York City, and Maurane is a visual artist specializing in video among other multimedia avenues living in Montreal. The film covers how they met in New York City and their continuous encounters there. To be blunt, it all starts rather uncomfortably and only gets worse from there. To call this a “situationship” is reductive and in light of the information we get to at the center of all this, unjustly places the focus on a living unreliable narrator in Pedlow.

In reality, Me and My Victim cannot really be called a film. In the synopsis, it’s described as a mix of fiction and nonfiction but the distinction between the two is never clear. Unless the fiction is Pedlow’s version of events versus Maurane’s recounting of what she really experienced. With Pedlow as the essential director of the project, he does the majority of storytelling. As he illustrates how he and Maurane initially met and how they came to keep spending time with each other (through numerous difficult encounters), she feels like she’s been relegated to provide sidebar commentary and supplementary counterarguments to Pedlow’s pontifications. This is interesting because Maurane’s experiences are the ones with real truth and gravity that would actually provide compelling discussions if Pedlow wasn’t so abhorrently dismissive, given that he was (and is by putting himself in the spotlight) the perpetrator of everything at the center of this. At the very least, the title is accurate.

Thankfully a saving grace of this experience is Maurane’s editing and post-production work, which she undoubtedly performed given the immediacy of the reactionary nature of meme culture constantly on display. But she never gets a real opportunity to get into who she is individually in the middle of Pedlow hogging the attention for himself. At a crucial point in this project, Pedlow and Maurane arrive at the most monumental event in their relationship together. And this is where things graduate from mildly uncomfortable to outright horrifying.

Pedlow sets the scene for what becomes crystal clear as textbook sexual assault bordering on rape while he continues to minimize Maurane’s valid interjections and follow-up questions. This is the point that becomes the most sickening for the audience and possibly Maurane herself, where she can be seen freezing up and retreating within herself as Pedlow shuts her down when she is just trying to share her experience. The challenge of admission from Pedlow comes later when Maurane basically pleads for him to realize the situation he created, yet he defiantly adheres to his version of events, even warping Maurane’s words to flip the accusation back on her (before revealing that he wrote a poem about this exact encounter, citing the actual things he committed against her in a piece he lovingly calls “Maurane is Punk”). If you were ever unsure of Billy Pedlow’s content of character during this whole endeavor, this certainly paints it in neon red just as Maurane decorates the project’s poster.

And Maurane’s post-production work on this does what she could not in that moment sitting mere inches away from Pedlow as he sticks to his conviction that the above event was as much her fault as it was his; various illustrations and screencaps criticizing his attachment to rape culture adorn the screen in between comments from Maurane that fall on Pedlow’s deaf ears and act as extensions of her justified outrage. If Pedlow had listened to her he would have noticed her anger, and from this point on the two operate on completely separate paths.

You can tell that Pedlow continues to feel he’s being adorably plucky about how he perceives their differences, fully subscribing to there being an amorous component to their relationship. Whereas Maurane, having fully recalled an event after partially burying it, has become sobered to whatever phenomena Pedlow cast on her since their meeting, appears to want out. It raises some questions for her safety in the physical premiere of the “film” itself, where Pedlow would travel to Montréal close to Maurane yet again to present this to a live audience. The resulting feeling of Me and My Victim is, in a word, sickening. No amount of edgy or humorous poetry from the project’s director could ever make his skewed portrait of morality palatable or at any point acceptable.

This is someone who refuses to admit error or learn from his grave transgressions, and proves in his ignorance that Maurane deserves better in the face of his enactment of ridicule. Yet Maurane still manages to use as much agency as she can to create a commentary within this project to rebel against the image he generates versus what monstrous machinery is operating the engine behind it. That’s how fucking punk she is.

My and My Victim had its World Premiere in the Underground section of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Directors: Maurane, Billy Pedlow

Rated: R

Runtime: 100m