REVIEW: "In A Violent Nature" takes an innovative concept and accomplishes little

Sundance standout inverts the slasher genre and makes it lifeless

Deep in the Ontario wilderness, a group of teenagers on a weekend trip unknowingly meddle with a violent local spirit and subsequently get picked off one by one by a chain-and-axe-wielding masked killer who slowly stalks them through the woods.

This sounds like the setup to a stereotypical, yet entertaining, horror movie that rips from classics like Halloween, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre until you realize the entire movie is told from the perspective of the killer. Take the slasher genre and invert it — then suck any fun out of it to make it a procedural and dull version of itself, and out pops In A Violent Nature. Chris Nash’s debut feature premiered at Sundance in January to high audience praise and proceeded to make its way to the East Coast as part of the Boston Underground Film Festival.

The concept is interesting and may lead horror fans to believe it could breathe life into a once-great genre that has since faltered, but cast those expectations aside as there’s a reason slashers are told from the perspective of the victims. Watching a man, who we will come to know as Johnny (Ry Barrett), for 94 long minutes as he walks around the Canadian wilderness is as fun as it sounds, even if now and then it is interrupted by some of the most brutal kills I’ve ever seen.

Horror fans might recognize this behind-the-back third-person perspective style most recently from a mid-movie sequence in Barbarian. Another inspiration for that (good) horror movie, I found stylistic choices for In A Violent Nature incredibly similar to Gerald Kargl’s highly controversial 1983 Austrian horror film Angst. In both, the audience follows from a technically interesting third-person perspective of a mindless killer on a violent rampage. Similarities stop there, though, as Angst builds tension and keeps the audience engaged in a narrative following a psychotic killer who has no goals except blood. Like Johnny, In A Violent Nature is completely devoid of emotion, tension and fear (three very important aspects of a horror movie). There’s no reason for the audience to care about anything happening on-screen.

The kills, which should be the most entertaining part of a slasher, range from creative and gnarly to downright boring and lazy. In one scene the killer beats someone’s face for minutes on end. In another, a log splitter is used to cut up the limp body of what is obviously a mannequin. For the entire scene, the camera is a fly on the wall and the audience watches as Johnny slogs back and forth between the machine controls and the corpse. All the while the gas engine blares at an annoying volume that made me wish, for the first time in my life, I could mute an entire theatre.

The idea of this film as a sequel or as happening parallel to another (more entertaining) movie is interesting in theory, but not in execution. It lacks tension and momentum, not to mention it contains a completely bare-bones mythology for the killer that seemed like an afterthought. The scenes very early on in the film where a majority of information is blurted out instantly feel like part of a reshoot where the writers had actors improv the killer’s mythology to try and get the audience to care.

This movie is hard to recommend. It is boring and brutal, with an ending sequence that is one of the biggest snooze-fests in recent memory for me. For a certain type of horror fan who is incredibly interested in the genre, this could maybe work as a double feature with Friday the 13th or put on as you play Dead By Daylight. For most others, though, it’s probably not worth the cost of admission plus 94 minutes.

In A Violent Nature will release in theaters on May 31, and will come to streaming later this year on Shudder.