Even if you are a devoted fan of super-gory horror films, it is unlikely that you have seen one quite like In a Violent Nature, the odd and intriguing debut from writer-director Chris Nash. In the broad strokes, the premise will no doubt seem familiar to anyone who has seen even a couple of the mad slasher films that proliferated in theaters in the early 80s in the hope of cashing in on the massive success of such low-budget endeavors as Halloween and Friday the 13th. Here, a locket dangling from a pipe in the middle of the woods is taken by some visiting oaf, a move that ends up reviving the rotted corpse of Johnny (Ry Barrett), a guy who went on a killing spree 60 years earlier—the result of enduring a horrifying prank—until being killed and buried with the aforementioned locket (his mother’s, naturally) being the only thing keeping him in the ground. Now brought back, Johnny stumbles around the woods in search of the locket, brutally—and I cannot stress “brutally” enough—murdering anyone who gets in the way until it all comes down to him and the Final Girl (Andrea Pavlovic), the lone survivor of a group of hapless young idiots who picked the wrong isolated wooded area to party.
The twist that Nash brings to the material—the very thing that inevitably divide most viewers—comes with the particular way in which he approaches the material. Instead of having viewers stick with—and presumably identify with—the rapidly-dwindling victims, the film presents Johnny as its protagonist and has us follow him around for the duration. All the usual cliches of the genre are still there but are relegated to the sidelines, where snatches of backstory occasionally drift in for our benefit (not that exactly need them). This also means that there are long stretches of the running time where we just watch Johnny walking through the surrounding flora and fauna, presenting an effect that is not unlike what might have resulted if Terrence Malick or Bela Tarr had decided to make The Burning.
Applying the kind of rigid cinematic approach one might expect to see in an art-house drama to a subgenre that used to consider itself ahead of the game if the camera was in focus may seem more than a little strange and I suspect that viewers going in expecting a run-of-the-mill slasher exercise are going to get restless and frustrated very quickly. And yet, what could have just become a mere formal experiment in playing with narrative expectations proves to be strangely fascinating as it goes on. Watching the familiar elements of the genre being played out from the outside—such as the hapless future victims discussing the vague history of Johnny’s backstory or trying to figure out ways of stopping him—reframes them in an new light that slasher fans might find to be intriguing. Nash also has a few tricks up his sleeve that further defy expectations in unusual ways, especially in the way that the final scenes unexpectedly unfold. Oh yes, while the kill scenes are obviously not scary in any conventional sense—since we are with Johnny, there is no real surprise or suspense to be had, aside from one very impressive extended sequence involving a lake, an unseen terror and an unaware swimmer—these set-pieces demonstrate the kind of fierce and gruesome imagination not seen since Sam Raimi was off in the woods doing the original The Evil Dead. (One such scene, the soon-to-be-infamous “yoga kill,” is so wild that I still cannot quite believe that I saw it with my own eyes.)
With its fusion of grindhouse and art-house sensibilities, In a Violent Nature is a film that seems destined to piss off a lot of viewers—horror buffs may resent the languid pacing and lack of conventional scares while others may find themselves nauseated by the entire thing. For those who are able to negotiate between those two extremes, though, it makes for a largely fascinating and occasionally jaw-dropping film that tries, and mostly succeeds, at breathing new life into overly familiar genre tropes by examining them from a different perspective. While it may not be the genre-redefining masterpiece that some early reviews have dubbed it, it still demonstrates more ingenuity, not to mention a droll (if not exactly dry) sense of humor, over the course of its 90-odd minutes than most of the other horror movies that have emerged so far this year and it leaves me eager to see what Nash does next. That said, if you do plan to see this film, consider bypassing the snack bar this time around—you can thank me later.