IN A VIOLENT NATURE - Mark Reviews Movies

In a Violent Natures, IFC Films / Shudder

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | May 30, 2024

If you watch enough movies, your mind might start to wonder what happens between the beats of a story or off-camera, and such thoughts almost certainly would emerge when it comes to a certain type of horror movie. What does an undead and unstoppable boogeyman of a slasher do when he isn't brutally murdering unsuspecting or helpless victims? In a Violent Nature, a clever but ultimately shallow subversion of a horror movie, provides an answer.

As one might expect, Johnny (Ry Barrett), a supernatural killer in the woods, spends a lot of time walking, waits around plenty, and occasionally makes a little extra effort to ensure his targets are surprised before enacting vicious and brutal violence upon them. There's a moment here, for example, when Johnny comes across a couple of guys, part of a camping party that unwittingly awake him at the very start of the story, in a cabin in the woods he calls home.

The killer causes a distraction, placing a branch against the steering wheel of a car outside the cabin to make the horn blare non-stop. Instead of simply staying nearby for one or both of the campers to check on the situation, Johnny proceeds to take the long way around the entire cabin and back to the car. Presumably, this is so that no one sees him lurking around before he can act, but on another level, it explains why it generally would take so long for a character like him in any other slasher movie to execute an attack.

Writer/director Chris Nash deserves some credit for the novelty of this concept, especially since he seems to be the first filmmaker to even consider pulling off this kind of story. That's despite it being several decades after the conceit of the slasher subgenre emerged and following too many new franchises, one-offs, sequels, and remakes to name.

On one level, it's a genuine surprise no one else has attempted it yet. On another, the movie serves as a good explanation for why no one has. A silent, supernatural entity with only killing on his mind isn't exactly a compelling protagonist, making the exercise in perspective feel like a joke that's a lot of setup for a predictable punch line.

The punch lines here, of course, are the kills, where Nash gets display a morbid curiosity for how the human body can be cut, sliced, broken, and demolished. The violence is extreme, especially since the movie's point of view means that, apart from the first of Johnny's several murders and one that's mainly the result of a lake, the camera is always watching. After all, Johnny doesn't look away when he's cutting off someone's head or punching a hole through a young woman's abdomen, and as gruesome as those descriptions may sound, they're either just the final bit or the very start of two of the killings here.

Ultimately, they're the payoffs to Nash's experiment, and it's worth questioning if that's really enough for as little as the rest of the movie attempts and does. The filmmaker brings a twisted sense of humor to those sequences. One, for example, begins with the victim doing some yoga before Johnny shows her—if she's still alive after a couple of moves—just how much the human body can contort with some force. If the rest of the movie showed a little more humor about its own construction and the various clichés it's deconstructing (The lack of a musical score doesn't diminish the horror, which is a lesson a lot of horror filmmakers could learn), the violence might have been more than a string of shocks.

Instead, Nash basically gives us the basic outline of a typical slasher story but, for the most part, keeps the usual narrative in the backdrop. Johnny emerges from his grave, among the ruins of an old fire tower, when one of the campers nabs a locket hanging from a pipe marking where zombie-like entity is buried. The rest of the plot, such as it is, follows Johnny as he hunts down and kills anyone he can find, looking for the necklace. A brief vision in a mirror before he first kills—well, this specific time in his history of haunting this forest—reveals that the locket belonged to his late mother.

The rest of Johnny's story emerges in a scene around a campfire, as the campers explain the urban legend of his accidental death as a kid, his father's fatally failed attempt to avenge his son, and the mysterious massacre of those responsible for both deaths. That scene's only notable, perhaps, both for how generic the back story is and how Nash cheats with the perspective gimmick to ensure we hear all of it. Otherwise, the victims are just that, apart from a "final girl" and a forest ranger (Reece Presley) who has a history with Johnny and gets to recite it—just before he appears to forget everything about this killer, highlighted by the camera being so close to Johnny.

Dissecting the mechanics of a slasher like Johnny is an intriguing idea, executed with admirable patience, and there's a single moment, when the killer mentally regresses to childhood, that adds a surprising layer of melancholy to the character. Beyond that, In a Violent Nature is little more than a neat experiment that someone else might improve upon later.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products