Just when you think that horror — currently in a major gold rush — is all out of fresh ideas, along comes In A Violent Nature. This is a film that takes the familiar gore of the slasher movie and gives it a fresh, gently experimental sheen. It’s not always an experiment that works, but it’s a very good sign that it exists.
Filmed by writer-director Chris Nash on a presumably minimal budget in the wilds of Ontario, Canada, the conceit here is: what if there were a slasher film told from the perspective of the guy doing the slashing? In this case, said slasher in question is Johnny, played by Ry Barrett: a mysterious brute figure who is seemingly awakened from a slumber when something very precious is taken from him, and who quickly sets out on a deadly warpath to get it back.
He is a fearsomely effective boogeyman. We don’t see his face until the third act, a now well-worn wrinkle (Longlegs, released the same day as this film, pulls this same trick). Instead, we watch him from carefully framed side-angles as he trudges through the woods, hands bloodied, flannel shirt torn, relentless and unbowed, like a Canadian cross between the T-800 and Leatherface. For long stretches, the camera hovers behind Johnny in an over-the-shoulder mid-shot, giving the impression that we’re playing a particularly grisly third-person video game.
The kills, when they eventually come, are suitably grim, as brutal as anything you’re likely to see in modern horror.
Meanwhile, in the distance, we hear the kind of dialogue that in any other film would be placed front and centre: characters pleading with each other about an unknown threat, unaware that that threat is right around the next tree. The effect is a fascinatingly jarring experience — like watching Jaws, entirely from the depths of the ocean.
It’s a shame, then, that this experiment is kind of abandoned relatively early, and only sporadically dipped back into, as the camera’s perspective shifts to other, less intriguing characters. For all its rejection of the horror orthodoxy, there are plenty of genre tropes being leaned on here. The centrepiece of the film involves a spooky cabin in the woods, populated by young, dumb people who tell each other scary stories, ultimately leading to a final girl. And even if it’s heard in the background, some of the dialogue — lines about “souls being laid to rest” or “something out of a horror movie” — plays out a little clunkily, too.
The kills, when they eventually come, are suitably grim, as brutal as anything you’re likely to see in modern horror, limbs twisted upon limbs. The prosthetics work is incredible. Gore-hounds will be satiated. But they will have to learn patience for it: the film’s pacing is slow and ponderous, as Nash adopts a Terrence Malick-ian reverence for the natural world, in all its beauty and ugliness (as that title implies). At least one brutal death scene is accompanied by nothing but the distant chirp of birds, the rustle of leaves, the glinting of sunlight through branches. It is beautifully shot and deeply considered. But it’s an approach that won’t work for everyone.
There are some neat tricks, including a false POV shot which is likely to wrongfoot you, and the film has at least a couple of surprises up its sleeve. It’s an impressive exercise in the power of directing choices and expectations of film grammar. If only this experiment had been brave enough to be more experimental.