Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸🩸out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Chris Nash
The Canadian slasher film In a Violent Nature roared out of the gates with much buzz from The Sundance Film Festival. It was bolstered by a menacing trailer that similarly had horror fans excited. It has a great-looking monster, and a few spectacularly gory kills will make this movie pop and evoke fond old memories. The advance word on this movie was that it reinvented the slasher film. It’s different, to be sure. The odd pacing, however, cannot be ignored, and the movie plods along with its villain for far too much of the movie. It felt like a shorter film padded to make a feature-length time. High Highs. Low Lows.
I had a difficult time rating this movie. The reviews coming out of the Sundance Film Festival suggested that In a Violent Nature balanced indie art-house horror with old-school exploitation slasher. That certainly seems to be the case. IFC Films, who is very selective with the films they promote, seems to think so. However, whether it succeeded with that vision is debatable. Here’s how it played out:
From the Old School Slasher
- A decaying, back-from-the-dead, unstoppable killing machine
- This killer uses tools as weapons, in this case, firemen’s axes and hook blades.
- A group of (mostly white) young people with inexplicably bad judgment and timing.
- An exposition dump of the tragic backstory of the monster told by the campfire.
- A memorable mask and costume for our monster.
- Over-the-top kill sequences with gore to spare, delightfully gruesome action.
- Killing by numbers, leading towards a final survivor.
From the new indie Art-House Scene
- Capitalizing on modern digital technology for a high-definition production. This does not look cheap, even if the film was inexpensive to make.
- Languid pacing: significant time spent following Johnny’s march through the woods.
- Impeccable editing transitions, particularly on Johnny’s long marches. Very interesting camera work and blending of day to night and location to location.
- Stationary camera angles for languid, liminal cinematography. Slasher movie as still life. Elegant and evocative. You end up staring at a single object for a while. It asks you to focus like no other slasher film that I can think of.
- Using natural sounds of birds and frogs, eschewing a soundtrack.
- Long tracking third-person shots that follow the monster for much of the movie.
Does this sound like a good mix? These are two very different approaches, and they often come at the expense of the other. This might be a movie that is too chill for an exploitation fan and too dumb for an art-house fan. Rather than peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and chocolate, we get peanut butter and chevre cheese. Two great tastes that taste great individually but together? Well, your mileage may vary. There may be some people who are dying to try this particular combination.
The Cast of In a Violent Nature:
- Ry Barrett plays Johnny, who returns from the dead when some dumb campers take his mother’s amulet from his makeshift grave.
- Andrea Pavlovic plays Kris, a potential and likely victim
- Cameron Love plays Colt, a potential and likely victim
- Liam Leone plays Troy, a potential and likely victim
- Charlotte Creaghan plays Aurora, a potential and likely victim
- Sam Roulston plays Ehren, a potential and likely victim
- Lea Rose Sebastianis plays Brodie, a potential and likely victim
- Alexander Oliver plays Evan, a potential and likely victim
- Reese Presley plays the Ranger, perhaps the camper’s best hope for a savior. He has dealt with Johnny before, and he’ll do it again if he has to.
- Timothy Paul McCarthy plays Chuck, a trapper and “The #1 Motherfucker” (according to his hunting hat). He’s dead meat, for sure. So says the trope.
- Lauren-Marie Taylor plays The Woman, who likes telling long-winded stories.
You may have noticed… a lot of these characters are virtually interchangeable.
A Short Synopsis of In a Violent Nature:
This will be pretty simple.
The film opens with a crumbling wreck of a wooden structure in the woods, focused on a golden locket and chain. The voices of young men are overheard looking at this trinket. Ehren warns the group to leave it alone. This broken fire watch tower was known to be a place haunted by the White Pine Killer, who was rumored to be buried near this wreckage. Troy shrugs off the warning and snags the locket, a fateful decision.
Immediately after the campers leave the site, the ground shakes as Johnny slowly crawls out of his shallow grave. He picks up the trail of the campers who took his treasure. Johnny approaches Chuck’s house, where we can overhear an argument between Chuck and the Ranger about Chuck’s careless use of bear traps. Foreshadowing? YES. Chuck is dead as soon as Johnny spots him. Chuck flees for the woods and gets an ironic taste of his bad hunting habits.
Johnny then moves on, in loping strides, towards the cabin in the woods where the visiting twenty-somethings are having a campfire story session. Ehren tells the sad and horrible fate of Johnny, the son of a greedy local shopkeeper who exploited the local loggers. Johnny was a dim kid, and was the scapegoat for the loggers. One day, after one of the loggers stepped on one of Johnny’s toys, he convinced his logger mates to pull a prank on Johnny that went horribly wrong. Johnny died, and he has been wreaking vengeance ever since. The campers are not impressed with the spooky campfire story, so they call it a night.
And then the killing begins. And repeats. Until only a few of them are left.
Evaluation: The Kills
This is Chris Nash’s first feature direction. He is also very aware of what kind of movie he made. In the Q&A session following its first screening at The Overlook Film Festival, he confessed that this movie is “An original derivative.” His background is in makeup effects, and all that experience pays off here. I am certain that one of the kills in this movie will be the goriest and most memorable one this year. (Unless Terrifier 3 manages to up its ante.) This scene is so wild that I am not sure if this film could hold up to an R-Rating. Gore fans will want to watch this movie just for this scene. It will almost certainly be referred to as the Yoga Kill going forward.
While there are some other well-constructed gory horror sequences, those won’t be the ones that audiences will remember. Something else that won’t be remembered? Any of the camper characters. Like the Friday the 13th movies, which is absolutely the greatest influence on this film, the characters are indistinct, and unless it’s the final girl, you won’t remember any names. Frankly, most of the final girls were forgettable, too. What you do remember is the KILLS. It took the Scream Franchise to reset the expectations for slasher movie protagonists with strong story arcs.
Evaluation: The Pace
The third-person camera usage was reminiscent of video games. The methodical movement through the scenery evokes games like Red Dead Redemption or Skyrim, the big sandbox games where you admire the landscape amongst the chirping of the birds and frogs. It’s soothing, and it goes on for a long time. Using incidental overheard voices also hearkens to video games. In a good theater, you will directionally perceive what Johnny hears, which is a great audio tool.
This odd pace proves problematic. You should NEVER get sleepy in a slasher movie. Unfortunately, some stretches go on for over five minutes, and all you do is follow Johnny. Liz told me in the theater during one of Johnny’s, “Well, I guess there’s a lot of downtime being a serial killing monster.” Nash noted that “Ry was our metronome.” and that they had left at least ten hours of additional footage of Johnny tromping through the Canadian wilderness.
The other element likely to trouble many viewers is the ending. It is long, slow, and tedious. Most importantly, it absolutely takes you out of the excitement of the movie when you should feel exhilarated. I nodded off a bit here, too, despite the large diet Coke I had been nursing caffeine out of. Perhaps this decision was made intentionally as a trope breaker, but it really landed like a wet blanket.
Conclusion:
It is odd to think of a slasher movie as being artistically ambitious, but this one is. It is fair to ask if that was a good decision. This may end up as the slasher film that wins over the art house crowd, but without strong characters, that feels like a big ask. I applaud the effort. I love the look of Johnny, and I hope they give Johnny a good last name. Every franchise serial killer gets a solid last name. Kreuger. Myers. Voorhees.
One lesson that I bet Nash knows is that you don’t have to make a ton of money or critical praise to make a movie like this into a franchise. I hope that we do get more Johnny. The costume is FANTASTIC. He behaves a lot like Jason or Victor Crowley. A big brawler who has more brains and is more clever than you would expect. Johnny is practically a Picasso with his creative killing skills.
In a Violent Nature is a pendulum swing of a film. When it is good, like the second act, it’s ripping! But in its low points, like the protagonist’s character development and the languid pace, it blows. As such, it finds its place in the middle of the scale.
This movie does not have a rating, and it probably shouldn’t even be tried. I could end up an NC-17 movie, and editing it down would make this film bland from front to back by filing off the high spots and not addressing the low ones. In a Violent Nature will receive a theatrical release on May 31, 2024.