You Will Have a Violent Reaction to ‘In a Violent Nature’

As to whether that reaction is good or bad...

In a Violent Nature, the debut feature film from writer/director Chris Nash, seems destined to be divisive. A slasher movie for the arthouse set, its threadbare plot is ostensibly that of a Friday the 13th film: a group of party-hearty twentysomethings goes camping, during which time they accidentally awaken an undead killer, and consequently spend a beautiful summer weekend being disfigured, dismembered, and disemboweled. What makes In a Violent Nature is unique is that a) for about 85-90% of its runtime, it’s told from the perspective of its silent, mask-wearing murderer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), and b) it has the pacing of a Tarkovsky film.

Do you like shots of a scary dude’s back while he plods through the woods at a leisurely pace? ‘Cause In a Violent Nature has shots of a scary dude’s back while he plods through the woods at a leisurely pace. Significant chunks of the movie are filmed like the Friday the 13th video game (Friday the 13th, in case you can’t tell from the fact that I’ve mentioned it twice in as many paragraphs, is a massive influence on In a Violent Nature; Johnny’s biggest distinction from Jason is his slightly-different name).

But the film’s audio/visual language is inconsistent.

Sometimes we watch the victims at a remove, through the trees, along with Johnny, but then Nash will cut into the scene and put us with the victims, like in a run-of-the-mill slasher movie. Furthermore, some of the kills are filmed at a great distance, or not shown at all, even though Johnny was, y’know, right there when they happened.

The editing is just as challenging. For example, there’s a scene where a girl swims alone in a lake, and we watch Johnny, standing on a distant shore, enter and submerge beneath the water. We all know what’s about to happen… but the camera doesn’t move from that faraway spot where Johnny was standing. We watch most of the drowning from a few hundred feet away - until Nash inexplicably cuts to another, closer, more “traditional” angle. Why does Nash choose to film so much of the scene from such a great distance - and why does he move us closer at the precise moment he does?

And then there’s the audio, which I found positively bizarre: sometimes, it’s naturalistic, with the volume of diegetic sound changing as Johnny gets closer to or further from the source of those noises. Other times, however, the volume remains at a consistent level: the people sound like they’re about three feet away regardless of their proximity to Johnny. This may have been an attempt to give these scenes a kind of supernatural quality, but they wind up feeling like they were poorly ADR’d (I speak from experience on this one).

If you read my lengthy essay about Late Night with the Devil, you know that I find this kind of aesthetic disparity maddening, but that I also try to give the filmmaker the benefit of the doubt. But I sincerely cannot comprehend the rhyme or reason behind Nash’s erratic approach. I don’t know if it’s meant to add to the spookiness of the movie, and if you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t bullshit my way through a theory of how it might contribute to the story’s thematics. Perhaps these choices aren’t arbitrary, but they certainly feel arbitrary. Much as I cannot explain why Tarkovsky chose to include a ten-minute-long shot of a car driving on the highway in Solaris, I cannot explain why Nash felt it was so important that we spend so much time watching Johnny stroll through the woods. The answer may simply come down to “mood.”

Mood is really what In a Violent Nature has to offer. It certainly can’t probe Johnny’s psychology, because Nash understands that to do so would rob the character of his potency (see: Rob Zombie’s barely-watchable Halloween remake). Nor does In a Violent Nature proffer strong motifs: as its title suggests, it ultimately posits Johnny as a natural tragic occurrence, like a wild animal… but that’s primarily evident from a lengthy conversation between two characters near the end in which they spell that out in the most literal of dialogue. There isn’t a ton of actual textual support for this concept, other than, I guess, how much time Johnny spends hiding in the trees.

My fellow splatter fans will surely take joy in some of the kills we do get to see, because they’re gooey and practical: there’s a death about halfway through the movie that is one of the most ridiculous murders I’ve ever seen in a slasher flick, which I mean as extremely high praise (Steven Kostanski, writer/director of the highly-amusing horror-comedy Psycho Goreman, is responsible for this film’s prosthetic work). But those kills are honestly few and far between… and what they’re between is a lot of lengthy static shots. And, yes, these more spectacular kills do clash a bit against the movie’s po-faced tone.

I cannot deny that In a Violent Nature is a unique experience; that alone gives it value. Previous attempts to pull back the veil on slasher killers have primarily taken comedic, post-modernist approaches (like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and Cabin in the Woods, both of which are excellent), and one has to appreciate Nash’s stab (pardon) at producing something more earnest. I just wish I better understood his decisions as a filmmaker.