IN A VIOLENT NATURE

  2024/18/94m

“Nature is unforgiving.”

Director/Writer: Chris Nash / Cast: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone, Charlotte Creaghan, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Sam Roulston, Alexander Oliver, Lauren-Marie Taylor.

Body Count: 8

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Moderate spoilers. Back in the 80s, we had a second hand Commodore Vic 20 computer, which had a few single-screen games you loaded up via cassette tapes. One of them was a POV maze where you could pretty much go forward, left, or right, hear 16bit footstep sounds AND NOTHING MORE. It was relentlessly boring and seemingly unsolvable. That unrelenting view down line-drawn corridors with zero features made Pong look like The Last of Us.

Technology was pretty simple in the 80s, and while I think that game was coma-invitingly boring, we probably played the crap out of it. Forty years later, it seems creatives are doing all they can to revert to that analogue, lo-fi, no-frills approach to media where a film like, say, The Prowler seemed to be the best thing going, even though there’s about 73 minutes of people walking around silently in the dark. The FX work was the payoff.

In recent years, slasher movies have taken to branching beyond their admittedly rather overdone modal conventions to incorporate hi-jinks like time travel, body swaps, sucked-into-the-film chaos, time loops, behind-the-scenes documentary satire, forced first-person-final-girl perspective, found footage, and what-happens-next positing. What is left?

In a Violent Nature has kept away from parody or satire to strip away multiple layers of polish to present a film almost entirely shot as a companion to the killer (rather than from his POV, as per the aforementioned as-final-girl entry, You Are Not Alone).

Somewhere in the lush woodland of Canada, near an old logging community, thoughtless teen visitors remove a gold locket hanging from a tree beside a collapsed fire tower. After they make off with it, the ground stirs and a hulking man hauls himself out. We see him only from behind for the most part as he gets his bearings and begins making his way through the forest towards the sound of voices.

After ridding the world of an annoying MAGA-type trapper, our backwoods behemoth creeps up on a firepit of youths and listens as they share his story – duh – a slow kid named Johnny who, sixty years before, was blamed for an accident and then himself died in a revenge prank gone wrong. Buried but not at rest, every now and then he rises from the earth to kill folks. Jason found drawing up legal docs.

Because we’re cruising along like a Remora to a cruising Great White, we don’t learn a whole lot about the septet of visitors, only that Ehren wanders off with his cassette Walkman on to smoke a joint by a tree and gets his head gruesomely cut off. Johnny then drags the body away (which is interesting to see, as you do wonder how Jason has the time and motivation to string his vics up in trees, in closets, etc.) and procures a creepy old firefighters mask and some gnarly chains and spikes.

Johnny systematically eliminates the other guests, some gorily, others not, until the depleting numbers finally notice he’s there (their previous obliviousness to the sound of thumping feet on the undergrowth being annoying), and flee to the ranger’s station, where they’re told they need to rebury him and hang the locket back where it was found. Of course, things don’t go to plan, and someone ends up in a log splitting machine seen used in Cut. At this juncture, I made a note that it’s amazing these long buried wackos seem always to know how to operate heavy duty machinery.

Here, In a Violent Nature kinda splits like oil and water, and we shift away from Johnny and follow the remaining survivor as she reaches the road and is picked up by a motorist played by Lauren-Marie Taylor from Friday the 13th Part 2 and Girls Nite Out. With almost 20 minutes remaining, the killer doesn’t appear again, and instead we get a long monologue about a bear attack, casting doubt on the final girl’s recollection of events.

There are some unsettling moments in the film, and while some reviewers bemoaned the last section, it’s here, when the truck pulls over and the paranoid survivor fixedly stares into the woods with the expectation the masked wacko will spring out from behind a tree any second, that inject some ‘reality’ to it. Slasher cinema has taught us that it won’t be over, but Chris Nash plays a neat trick on us by threatening the return of the loon and then refusing to play ball.

Elsewhere, long uninterrupted takes work to build an undercurrent of tension and prove economical for the runtime, which has a lot of following Johnny through the trees. In truth, the film could probably be a 45-minute short without this content, but being the whole what-hasn’t-already-been-done raison d’etre, it’s something of a necessary evil, even if I was growing restless when some sections ground on excruciatingly for several minutes. The lack of any soundtrack also gives things a strange banal reality. In some ways it highlights small cracks in performances and action timing, in others it gives the gruesome denouements a sort of anti-sensationalistic grittiness.

A very brave undertaking with plenty of interesting ventures beyond the box, though not one I feel has much rewatch appeal.