Review: In a Violent Nature (2024)

In a Violent Nature (2024)

Not rated

Score: 3 out of 5

In a Violent Nature is an immaculately put together deconstruction of the slasher genre that just didn't quite do it for me, even if I can appreciate what it set out to do. The basic conceit is that it's a standard backwoods slasher story about a group of dumb college kids who venture into the woods and awaken Johnny, a mentally handicapped hulk of a man with a penchant for killing, by stealing the necklace of his left at the site he was buried, but the twist here is that, barring two scenes (the obligatory "gather around the campfire to tell the urban legend" infodump, and the ending), it's all told from Johnny's perspective as he wanders the woods in search of his prey. It's a slasher movie stripped down to the barest essentials, cutting out nearly all plot and character development in favor of being an atmospheric mood piece about a man stalking and killing people that I've seen one person compare to the Terrence Malick version of a Friday the 13th film.

And if I'm being honest, while it did have some very nifty moments and a cool idea at its center that it made some interesting use of, it also, perhaps inadvertently, demonstrated that the slasher formula depends on a lot more than just a guy in a mask hacking up horny teenagers while the virgin prevails in the end. I'm somebody who needs interesting characters in order to care what happens to them, and this movie made a very deliberate stylistic choice to make everybody involved out to be the most one-dimensional versions of themselves possible. Johnny is Jason Voorhees and every backwoods maniac inspired by him combined into one guy, his victims are every slasher movie cannon fodder archetype in the book, the final girl is telegraphed from the moment we first see her, and it's all in the service of telling the viewer exactly what kind of scenario we're watching so it can fiddle around with it more easily. And to its credit, it does a good bit of fiddling, and a lot of it works. The manner in which the killers in these movies find ways to vanish into thin air only to reappear where their victims least expect it is exploited for a great scene where we find out just how crafty and cunning Johnny really is, no "offscreen teleportation" necessary. A scene where Johnny finds and plays with a toy car that the college kids brought with them proved to be surprisingly touching. Johnny has to walk everywhere, and with this we get a lot of beautiful, moody nature footage of the central Ontario woods where this was filmed. The ending shows, in lengthy detail, just how traumatized the final girl of a slasher movie might actually wind up.

This is why I often found myself wishing that the movie cut deeper. The characters other than Johnny are completely forgettable and not very well-acted, getting even less development than slasher movie victims usually do because of how much focus is put on the killer, and while it may have been deliberate, it didn't do anything to get me interested in them. Watching a guy hack people up just doesn't have the same punch when we plainly see his victims as nothing more than meatbags. Johnny himself is also a very clear-cut example of what you see being what you get, resting on genre conventions for his characterization more than anything. There are scenes indicating that this isn't Johnny's first rodeo (i.e. that this is a sequel), but they proved to be some of the most frustrating scenes in the film, teasing something deeper but refusing to follow through on it. (How would the killer react to being in a horror sequel?) A common stereotype of slasher movies, popularized by Roger Ebert's famous quote about "dead teenager movies", is that they're nothing but plotless carnage and T&A, an assessment I've often found unfairly judges the genre by its worst examples. Here, we have a very clear-cut and deliberate example of what one of Ebert's archetypal "dead teenager movies" actually looks like, one in which the killer is literally the protagonist rather than just figuratively like he became in the later sequels to many classic slasher franchises, and it reaffirmed my appreciation for the slashers past and present that went above and beyond with interesting characters and actual depth to their stories.

That said, I can always appreciate a good bucket of blood on a primal, lizard-brain level, and if nothing else, the kills here are standouts. Some are artistic, like the first kill in the film that gives us a great cutaway shot that merely implies what Johnny did to that poor bastard's face before showing us a few minutes later. A classic slasher kill, that of a scantily-clad woman going for a swim in the lake and then getting dragged beneath the water and drowned, is presented as matter-of-factly as possible in a way that managed to feel eerie. There were two kills that will probably go down in slasher history for their brutality, one of which felt like an especially gratuitous Mortal Kombat fatality brought to life (...does that even fit there?) and the other of which was drawn out for a few minutes in such a manner that you feel every second of the character's suffering as you know what awaits. Even the more basic kills were bloody and graphic. And in between, all those long shots of Johnny wandering the woods did a lot to build an eerie atmosphere, like the most fucked-up nature hike ever as I eagerly anticipated what he was going to do next.

The Bottom Line

In a Violent Nature is plotless to a fault and demonstrates that there's more to a great slasher than just a cool killer hacking people up in creative ways, but it offered a unique perspective on a timeworn genre and delivered plenty of potent scares and mood. It's one I can only really see diehard horror fans enjoying, but if you consider yourself such, then you'll probably find a lot to like about this, perhaps more than I did.