Experiencing Interruptions?

Maraschino

When a centerfold suffers a breakdown on her partner's birthday, she must outwit her SmartHome on a blood-soaked path to having her own cake and eating it, too.

  • Alyssa Cody Garcia
    Director
  • Alyssa Cody Garcia
    Writer
  • Simona Galant
    Writer
  • Simona Galant
    Producer
  • Lacey Claire Rogers
    Key Cast
  • Chad Doreck
    Key Cast
  • Justin Usle
    Key Cast
  • Kristen DiMercurio
    Key Cast
  • Mads Fridolin Vejlby
    Cinematographer
  • Qiqi Deng
    Editor
  • Maui McDonald
    Production Designer
  • Project Type:
    Short, Student
  • Genres:
    Satire, Neon Noir, Erotic
  • Runtime:
    17 minutes 13 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 15, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    45,644 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States, United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    Yes - American Film Institute, AFI Conservatory
Director Biography - Alyssa Cody Garcia

A native Los Angelena, Alyssa began her career unconventionally as an art historian and archaeologist of ancient Rome. An alumna of Columbia University and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, she decided to pursue her own art instead, joining a Meisner studio and directing a few shorts, which led her to the AFI Conservatory as a Directing Fellow. Her predilection for pitch-black humor, the psychoanalytical and all things macabre compels her toward stories that explore the idiosyncrasies of human behavior—in all of their deliciously explicit glory—through the eyes of those we least expect.

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Director Statement

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 think 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 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, female “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.