IN A VIOLENT NATURE (2024) turns the slasher movie inside out
While it certainly won't be for everyone, Chris Nash's "ambient horror" take on the slasher genre offers a fascinating twist on old clichés.
“They don’t go back for food or anything. They just keep killing. No reason at all. Bobby says animals don’t get too hung up on reason.”
I was literally the only one in the audience for my particular screening of In A Violent Nature.
A horror movie, playing in a mainstream multiplex, at 6pm on a Wednesday evening, and not one other soul was in there with me.
Nobody had booked any seats before I did.
Nobody came in late.
Nobody was tucked away in a corner at the back.
The only other person I saw the entire time was the member of staff obligated to silently check in every now and then to ensure no illegal recording or other such funny business was afoot.
Other than that, it was just me, my sugar-free cherry coke, my bag of M&Ms-topped popcorn, and the silver screen all to myself.
This has to be a metaphor for In A Violent Nature’s niche appeal, served to me on a silver platter ready-made for review fodder, if ever I’ve seen one!
I mean, of the horror movies I’ve managed to see in cinemas so far in 2024, people turned up for The First Omen; people turned up for Longlegs; people turned up for MaXXXine; people did not turn up for In A Violent Nature. And that’s a crying shame, because if more fellow horror-loving fiends had come to check it out, and if they had the patience for the film’s deliberate, leisurely pace, they would’ve been richly rewarded with some of the most spectacularly splattery, bloodthirsty, gobsmackingly outrageous and awesome kills any enthusiastic gorehound could ask for.
(Some may recall seeing a audio clip circulate on Twitter prior to the film’s wide release, wherein you heard an audience react with shock and applause to a kill scene of some sort that sounded quite crunchy and nasty. This was what put the film on my radar in the first place, and I wondered if I’d know what that scene would be when I saw it. Short answer: OH YEAH. YOU’LL KNOW IT WHEN YOU SEE IT.)
What makes In A Violent Nature more interesting, beyond the thrills of its kills, is in the perspective of its presentation. Not just by way of almost exclusively following the killer’s point of view instead of their victims, because if that’s all it was, you’d feel you’ve seen that avenue explored before in the likes of Angst, Maniac, or The House That Jack Built. In many ways, you could reasonably say it’s like that one sequence in David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) - where the camera follows behind Michael Myers going on a new killing spree in one extended tracking shot - stretched out to feature length.
But where In A Violent Nature takes things a step further is in its steadfast insistence on looking at its Jason Vorhees-type supernatural slasher villain, Johnny, with the calmly detached, passive observance of a wildlife documentary. And even then, you don’t get the editorialising of a David Attenborough narrator, or a Hans Zimmer-produced soundtrack, to tell you what to feel about what you see. Just the calming sounds of forest ambiance, punctuated by the steady tromping of Johnny’s unhurried footfalls, and the occasional terrified scream and wet slicing of flesh.
It’s like if Apichatpong Weerasethakul directed an Evil Dead movie, or if Gus Van Sant in the era of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days decided to remake Friday the 13th (though not as a shot-for-shot version this time, thank you very much).
But I would be remiss if I failed to point out that In A Violent Nature is funny, too! The aghastness at the audacity and inventiveness of Johnny’s kills is one kind of funny, but also, in the film’s villain-focused depiction of your bog standard “vengeful undead killer roams the woods to dispatch stupid twentysomethings who unwittingly resurrected him” plot, it’s funny to see the killer have to carry out the various mundane tasks that a regular slasher flick would keep offscreen to preserve his enigmatic, unpredictable air. Here, you see him walk and walk and walk and walk everywhere, sometimes with a purpose when he hears his prospective victims nattering with inane interpersonal chatter we (and he) care nothing about, but oftentimes he’s just listlessly wandering the woods, day and night, trudging through the vast expanse of nature’s beautiful, wordless dominance over all things, until the soon-to-be-dead twentysomethings eventually come close enough to cross his path, and give him something to do in his singleminded quest to get back his mother’s necklace from whoever took it, and woke him up to begin with. The stabs of extremely deadpan dark humour come from the emotions you project onto Johnny’s stoic body language, as he lumbers from one location/victim to the next in a Sisyphean slog, the act of killing off generic slasher-movie randos turned into the mundanity of a pesky chore, like pulling out an irritating number of weeds from a garden.
Yet the film winds up having somewhat more depth to it than I would’ve expected by the end, its recontextualised rendering of a slasher narrative subverted once more by the story signing off on a grace note of examining the ambiguity and paranoia left lingering by unresolved trauma, and the feeling that, much like with nature, we exist at the mercy of a chaotic world that we can neither control nor understand. When I say that the ending of In A Violent Nature genuinely put me in mind of the ending of No Country For Old Men, know that I tell not one word of a lie.
Annoyingly, In A Violent Nature is close to a concept for a story I’ve wanted to develop outside of the confines of my imagination for years now - i.e. the notion of solely watching the trials and tribulations of the fiddly work a horror movie antagonist puts into staging their murderous rampages. Like if an entire Scream movie showed the nuts and bolts of the latest Ghostface’s methods of hiding in places for extended periods of time to carry out their surprise attacks. Would they get bored waiting? Would they get a cramp in their leg or an ache in their back that threatens to make them reveal their hiding spot too early? Would they find it hard to breathe while wearing the mask for so long? Where do they stash the costume when they duplicitously pretend to be innocent in front of those they’d just tried to kill? How do they get to and from each location they need to be at? How much running and walking and physical arduousness do they endure? And so on and so forth in that kind of vein. Of course, In A Violent Nature isn’t 100% exactly like the story I’ve long been vaguely envisioning, either tonally, thematically, or narratively… but it is within striking distance, I’ll give it that.
Naturally, In A Violent Nature won’t be for everyone - after all, we need only refer back to the anecdote that opened this review - as some will find it pretentious, boring, pointless, and worthless. But for those whom it does work equally as well for as it did for me, if not more so, then In A Violent Nature may be one of the most fascinating, unique, subversive, and entertaining horror movies in recent memory.