By There are plenty of things to say about Chris Nash’s buzzy POV slasher IN A VIOLENT NATURE, but if you only know one thing, make it be this: roughly a third into it, we see a woman’s torso bent and contorted a full 270 degrees, twisted in such a way to force her head through her own stomach.
It was gnarly.
It was gruesome.
And it was awesome.
Like watching a star wide receiver catch a touchdown, or a hearing band play their hit song during an encore, the audience burst into applause when it happened; these aren’t just regular filmgoers, these are Monday evening sickos who showed up to this local AMC well versed in the trappings of gory, bloody, fucked up horror fare. And regardless of how the movie was going to play out from here, we all collectively knew that once scene would live on forever in our minds, and that would be enough.
Of course, for better or mostly worse, IN A VIOLENT NATURE isn’t 90 straight minutes of watching people’s faces get physically forced through their literal guts. And while that’s nothing against the film, per se, as very few movies could (or should) strive for that level of grisly commitment, this sequence, and especially the audience reaction, speak to what make Nash’s film a unique let down.
Crucially, there is a story happening amidst all the blood and gore of IN A VIOLENT NATURE. As these things so often do, it involves teens in the woods coming across an amulet they shouldn’t have, accidentally awakening the long dormant corpse of Johnny—a Voorhees type who will stop at nothing to get it back. By design, the narrative is a collection of paint-by-numbers tropes, sacrificing narrative complexity for a cinéma vérité-style tracking of the killer rather than the victims. And when the movie works, that focused simplicity pays off. In its best moments, we are viewing Johnny in third person, ingesting small pieces of the story through his voyeuristic gaze. Seeing the characters reacting to being in a horror movie from the other side of the story is cleverly executed—just artful enough to not feel fully like a video game cutscene, just self-aware enough to play these expositional exchanges for laughs.
But oddly, for a film touted as being entirely from the killer’s perspective, Nash bafflingly doesn’t commit to that framing. IN A VIOLENT NATURE is for a very specific audience of people who don’t need to know any backstory about Johnny to lock in on the genre’s many clichés. Shudder clearly acquired it because it speaks to those who have TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE in their Letterboxd Top Four, and thus don’t require pandering—it’s a word-of-mouth indie film, not SCREAM. And yet, there’s an excruciatingly long campfire sequence with our group of teens breaking down the legend of the White Pines Slaughter that feels increasingly unnecessary the further into it we get. Johnny is abandoned in the woods just out of frame; by the end, our time with the teens is needlessly humoring backstory.
That could be forgiven if it weren’t for the final 20 minutes, where IN A VIOLENT NATURE flips its entire perspective, generically becoming the thing it was subverting by following our final girl as she flags a car down. Nash is clearly more invested in the unsafe, creeping dread that follows her getting into the car than ever playing out Johnny’s narrative to more logical conclusions. It is hinted that there is a way to kill Johnny, but for some reason that is abandoned in favor of a narrative that just returns him with the amulet, a payoff that hardly works after abandoning our killer for so long in the final act. I could feel the audience wondering why this drawn-out finale didn’t feature our main character, the same guy we’d all clapped for an hour prior.
For the second time this year, I’m going to reference a Geico ad while reviewing a movie, this time a relatively recent one in which teens are running from a serial killer. Rather than jump into a running car to drive away, they hide in a shed. It ends with a quick cut to the chainsaw-wielding maniac, already in the shed, who pulls up his mask and rolls his eyes at the stupidity. It’s a silly ad, but it succinctly sums up our collective understanding of how this genre prioritizes cool kills and savage violence over things like plot cohesion or rational thinking. Johnny doesn’t roll his eyes during some of the sequences in IN A VIOLENT NATURE, but we certainly do as his second person POV, and there are laughs to be had there. When the film is locking into that mode, it’s a ton of fun. When it abandons it, we’re just watching a cheap, low-budget slasher film talk down to us—not in an empty-headed way either. Fortunately, we’ll always have that woman being bent through herself, and that kinda makes it all worth it.
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