In a Violent Nature (2024)

**/****
starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Lauren Taylor
written and directed by Chris Nash

by Walter Chaw Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is wonderful on a technical level, but I’m suspicious of its motives. The best you could say about it is that if it likes slasher movies, it likes them for what seems like many of the wrong reasons; and the worst you could say is that maybe it doesn’t like slasher movies at all. At best, it doesn’t understand them and, because of that, doesn’t respect them. And because of that, I had a feeling it was mocking them–like being caught in an awkward conversation with someone explaining something you love back to you as something they think is, at its heart, a silly distraction. (Or, in this case, a vacuous dispenser of cheap thrills.) I suspect In a Violent Nature‘s primary influences were not, despite a few superficial call-outs, Twitch of the Death Nerve or Halloween or even the more atavistic Friday the 13^th saga, a series commonly misread as shallow and puerile. No, what it most resembles is Gun Media’s asymmetrical third-person, open-world Friday the 13^th survival game from 2017, which allows you to play as hockey-masked Jason Voorhees while a camera follows you over your right shoulder, Dardenne Brothers-style. The difference is that the video game has Jason’s mother’s voice urging him on, coddling him with warmth when he’s dispatched another victim, thus giving him a constant prod to engage in various, fruitless attempts to be a dutiful son, the desired offspring of a lost parent. The video game, in other words, sees the slasher as a vehicle at some level for exorcizing mental disturbances caused by abandonment and unrequited love for a parent. In a Violent Nature is essentially the feature-length version of that brilliant Geico commercial where a group of twentysomething idiots eschew a running automobile and hide behind a wall of chainsaws in a well-lit kill shed instead.

In a Violent Nature‘s killer is deformed, witless, voiceless Johnny (Ry Barrett), killed in a practical joke gone wrong and resurrected now and again to murder lusty teens unfortunate enough to pitch tents in Johnny’s woods. He has a motive, though, as the anonymous, interchangeable teens steal his mother’s necklace from a shrine in a clearing, awakening Johnny from his unrestful slumber and putting him on a mission to recover this memento mori. You could say this provides depth for the monster, but I don’t think it does. Despite the film forcing an identification with Johnny with its third-person shadowing of him, we don’t get much insight into whether he is anything more than a golem controlled by a totem. The extent to which you like In a Violent Nature will likely depend on the extent to which you agree that slasher movies are only about implacable, indestructible murder machines out to slay nubile young people trying to have sex. In the abovementioned video game, you can eavesdrop on your camp counsellor victims’ inane conversations: their clumsy attempts at flirtation, their insensitive jokes about local legends, their ridiculous conclusions as to where their missing friends might have disappeared to in the middle of the night. In a Violent Nature does that as well, as does that Geico commercial. It’s funny every time I hear it, whether it’s satirical, as it is in the game and the commercial, or derisive, as it is in the film. You may disagree about whether In a Violent Nature is sending up the slasher or just a different approach to the slasher that disguises its emptiness with a high-concept approach, but both of these possibilities suggest an “elevated” attitude towards genre I guess I despise.

Consider how well Scream works–by itself but especially in comparison–as a satire and an authentic slasher, too, with characters, including the killer/s, who are beautifully fleshed-out, intelligent, and programmed into their roles by social transgressions, pop culture, and generational traumas. I don’t know if satire works if it isn’t a good example of what it means to dissect. In a Violent Nature doesn’t even pay off a title that teases not only an ecological angle (like, say, John Frankenheimer’s backwoods horror Prophecy, home to one of the greatest sleeping-bag kills in movie history) but also a philosophical angle playing with the idea that nature as a concept is vicious and lowers men to savagery (like Deliverance or its Canadian counterpart, Peter Carter’s magnificent Rituals). All the title really does is riff and pun. Has Johnny devolved into his state of avenging meat stick? The story of his mental limitations suggests not. Have he and his family been so wronged that he would be trapped on this plane as a demonic force, punishing unfortunates for…taking shit off his grave? The films In a Violent Nature seeks to take the piss out of are often rich with social commentary. They are about class, loyalty to families and traditions as the world leaves them behind, and gender issues most of all. While Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws is the foundational text for gateway explorations of the slasher, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of articles offering serious scholarship on the topic. In a Violent Nature offers a few inventive kills designed to make you laugh for their extravagance, some lovely cinematography of nature (which always takes a good picture), and a lot of other stuff that isn’t as novel as some want you to believe. Ultimately, it fails to keep doing its one trick. What is a one-trick pony that forgets his one trick? But is the movie funny? Sure. Possibly, it’s the wrong kind of funny.