Review: In a Violent Nature

Director:  Chris Nash

Stars:  Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Lauren Taylor

While Leatherface, Michael Myers and Freddie Krueger have enjoyed numerous cinematic rebirths, Jason Voorhees has been left chained to the bottom of the lake, bound up in a mire of rights battles that have kept the machete-wielding zombie away from our screens since the none-trashier 2009 remake. That’s still the case today, but Chris Nash’s brutally simplistic lakeside slasher In a Violent Nature should appease those who long for one more Friday the 13th. At least, for now.

The premise here ought not to work. Essentially this is a slasher movie which is 75% shot like an over-the-shoulder video game where we follow the deformed killer, not the clutch of young horny victims. It’s a neat experiment, in theory, but one imagines the routine getting supremely dull and ultimately limiting; spending time only with an emotionless cipher, where any encounters with another person are going to be, by definition, brief. As an apologist for roughly half of the Friday the 13th films and with a soft-spot for the backwoods slasher in general… that’s a fair descriptor even when the sleepaway camp kids are the focus. Depth isn’t this genre’s strong suit.

Still, In a Violent Nature has it’s work cutout justifying taking this idea out for a 91 minute walk. It does move at a dedicated – some might say hypnotic – trudge. Pulling himself up out of the ground, lumbering killing machine Johnny (Ry Barrett) roams the woods he calls home, documented by Nash in a manner that recalls the Elephant films (both Alan Clarke’s and Gus Van Sant’s) until he happens upon a group of young folks telling campfire stories. Wouldn’t you know it, the topic is his very own Voorhees-esque mythos. This, evidently, is more than enough to make them targets of our tight-lipped territorialist.

The slasher movies of the ’70s and ’80s didn’t run on the same motors as their modern brethren. Past trauma was often written in as a hasty excuse for the violence, nothing more. Few thought of giving the heroine something to overcome other than the axe. The ’00s gamut of post-9/11 torture porn titles (often slasher remakes) exorcised audience traumas, providing an outlet for a globally-felt sense of defeatist nihilism. In a Violent Nature adheres to the most basic inclinations of the former, and sits within a growing set of new horror films working against the introspective vogue of our last decade. Stark, brutal simplicity is, in short, the point. The soundscape of In a Violent Nature is barebones, too. Nothing but footsteps, foliage and the occasional shriek of birds or whomp of a weapon swinging.

This means two things. One; being able to write the synopsis of In a Violent Nature on the back of a napkin is entirely the point and Two; you’ve gotta make up for the sparseness with something visceral. The kills here are laughably, comically bloody. One poor girl has her entire head pulled through the gaping wound in her torso. Nash ensures we get a good look at the vertebrae in her neck busting under the skin as she’s pulled into a human pretzel. Later, another would-be victim – final girl Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) – has enough time to make a stealthy run for it because Johnny is too preoccupied with pulping a fresh kill into bloody paste. Thanks to its very nature, this is one for those who prioritise the “stalk” in their “stalk n slash” movies, but the bloodletting is no afterthought.

After an atmospheric slow build, Nash gets away with his running time by changing things up, breaking his own rules, and turning this lean horror flick into a game of cat ‘n’ mouse before brazenly switching sides for a fun detour into one of the genre’s classic turns (with a prize appearance from slasher royalty Lauren Taylor (justice for Friday the 13th Part II‘s Vickie!)). At it’s best, In a Violent Nature shares space with Ti West’s minimalist career-best horror pastiche The House of the Devil. It taps into similarly authentic-feeling nostalgia without the cheap imitation leaned on by most (including West’s more recent efforts).

2024 has seen a number of high-concept leftfielders appear across genres as filmmakers experiment with conventions (Sasquatch Sunset isn’t too far removed from this anthropological study, strangely), trying to cook old recipes in new ways. In a Violent Nature will no doubt inspire as much derision from the impatient as applause from the devoted. Such is the fate of anything this deliberately pared back, this pointedly thin.

But I’d argue that there’s some power in that sparseness. That In a Violent Nature‘s intentions are more primal. To directly stoke our fears and paranoias that someone, somewhere might be irrationally, mercilessly out to get you. The eerie, nagging ending doesn’t let any of us off the hook.