Movie Review: 'In a Violent Nature'

In a Violent Nature (2024)

Directed by Chris Nash

Written by Chris Nash

Starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reese Presley

Release Date May 31st, 2024

Published May 30th, 2024

In a Violent Nature is a brutal horror slasher movie with some stomach-churning scenes of violence. A masked killer stalks the woods and kills campers or anyone else who gets in his way. It all sounds like a rip off of Friday the 13th. Indeed, In a Violent Nature is inspired by that legendary horror franchise, but this no mere Jason movie. Director Chris Nash has made a horror slasher at a lake in the woods that takes the tropey premise and uses it as a vehicle for testing his filmmaking skills.

The opening scene of In a Violent Nature reveals the style and patience of writer and director Chris Nash. The camera falls on a decrepit structure in the woods. There is no music score, just the sound of nature and a pair of male voices. The two men are arguing over something they've seen hanging from a broken piece of the structure. It's a gold locket. One of the unseen men says that the locket is there for a reason and that they should leave it be. The other argues in favor of taking it. After the first man leaves, the second man makes his move and steals the locket.

This is a terrific piece of filmmaking and writing. It creates an expectation surrounding an object, a locket. The locket will become our McGuffin, the thing that is desired by our characters and essential to our lead actor. Meanwhile, the expectations of the horror genre are that this locket belongs to a backwoods, hillbilly, serial killer. We assume that he will soon return to this decrepit structure, see that his gold locket is missing and go on a killing spree and we're mostly right. But where we are wrong is a great piece of visual subversion.

Here, director Nash cuts to a shot looking down at what we thought was a broken tree or perhaps a piece of this structure having fallen off and struck in the ground. What it actually is, is a piece of pipe with a hole in the top. Underneath the pole is a grave and from this grave emerges our killer. It's an incredible and disturbing reveal that upends our expectations, grabs our attention and kick starts the rest of the movie, the search and destroy mission to recover that gold locket and kill anyone who gets in the way. This is done in less than three minutes of screentime without us having seen the killer's face or any of his soon to be victims.

Now, you might assume that In a Violent Nature will move in a more conventional and familiar direction, but no. The movie instead stays with our killer and patiently and methodically follows him as he stalks through the forest. The beauty and bounty of the verdant and vibrant forest is juxtaposed by our bloody, nasty, ugly killer and by the poor animals caught in traps surrounding the forest, carcasses left to rot in the sun. If our killer has an opinion about this, we won't ever know for sure. What we do know is that the traps will lead him to his next victim. All the while, the movie patiently and silently stays by the side of the killer.

Eventually we will catch up with our campers and they will have the chance to expound on the plot and provide a little bit of lore. Naturally, this happens around a campfire where one of the campers relates the story of the White Pine Massacre. A mentally challenged young man was lured into the woods on the promise of toys. He was led to the top of a tall fire tower and then pushed off the top to his death, or so we are led to believe. Soon after the death of Johnny, the slow young man, bodies began piling up at the local ranger station.

Here the camera never really settles on any one of the campers. In a stylistic departure from typical movie style, the camera appears to be drifting away and staring into the distance. We see the fire, the campers, but the camera isn't taking a static perspective to capture the campers when they speak. Instead, the camera stays at a distance while seeming to search the woods behind the campers for Johnny who is there watching the scene unfold and hearing his legendary origin story be told amid the drunken slurring of words and the sucking sound of a deep hit of weed.

No music score, just the voices of the campers and the sounds of nature. It's actually quite basic but the back-to-basics aesthetic of In a Violent Nature is so different from the norm of modern horror that it stands out as being innovative, stylish and unnerving. Where most movies like In a Violent Nature use a screeching score to tell you when to be afraid and when you can take a breath, In a Violent Nature uses the lack of a music score to create an unending tension that will not let up as the film progresses into some of the most brutal violence we've seen since Jason Voorhees hung up his hockey mask.

So, what of Johnny, our killer? He's not much of a character. He is in so many ways like Jason Voorhees, silent, hulking, ugly as sin. The only difference is that Jason has his famous music cues and sounds, and Johnny does not. Jason has a hockey mask and, eventually, Johnny has an old fireman's mask that makes him look like a nasty, oversized, Minion. To get at the heart of Johnny, Johnny is to Jason Voorhees what Art the Clown from Terrifier is to Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, an influence and jumping off point for violence that is even more extreme and shocking than anything Jason or Freddy have brought forth in the past.

If you enjoy your slasher movies with a great deal of patience and hardcore brutality, In a Violent Nature is definitely the movie for you. It's also a movie that demonstrates a tremendous amount of technical skill on the part of the director, Chris Nash. I am so impressed with his style, his patience, his use of juxtaposition, that I don't really care about the nasty violence and gore. It's the style, the contrast of the beauty of nature and the fly-riddled visage of the killer, that makes me appreciate In a Violent Nature. If this is what Chris Nash is capable of on his first time behind the camera, I cannot wait to see what he does next.

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