I Just Saw

I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and a genuine example of the formula. It’s clearly a riff on the Jason Voorhees, Friday the 13th movies, to a point where you could call it a spiritual sequel, but its deconstruction of the formula expands to all movies about mad supernatural killers who stalk twenty-something teenagers.

It’s basically a psychological drama about what it would be like to be such a villain, the first film to seriously ask, ‘How does it feel, moment to moment, to be a motiveless horror movie construct?’ For a slasher fan, it sheds new light on all those Jason, Michael, Freddy, etcetera flicks that came before. That it’s also incredibly gruesome in its practical effects is a lovely bonus.

The killer here, like all his predecessors, does in fact have a crude motivation open to discussion by fans. And like all the great (and not-so-great) slasher movies of the past, what happens in the current storyline is motivated by horrific events in the past. A rural part of America is haunted by Johnny (Ry Barrett), the zombie of a boy who was killed by loggers in the so-called White Pines massacre. A group of young people find a locket by the remains of an old fire tower and take it, an event which is followed by Johnny’s emergence from his slumber.

The narrative is told mostly from his mute and undead perspective as he walks the woods, killing whomever he finds in search of the locket, often in the grisliest manner possible. Very little music plays as he goes his gory way and the rest of the film is largely matter-of-fact in presenting its plot. Its stroke of genius is in how it assembles all of the tropes and elements of a slasher film so that you can tell the exact same story from the victims’ perspectives, then turns them on their heads so that you see it only through the eyes of the killer.

Back when slashers were enjoying their heyday critics would complain that they would present themselves too much from the killer’s POV, which they found sadistic and often sexist, but really this wasn’t the case beyond certain shots. The main perspective always rested with the Final Girl and her cannon fodder friends. That’s why some of the worst slasher films are just nonentities walking in the woods and talking nonsense between kills.

One of In a Violent Nature’s best scenes is when we hear the story of the White Pines massacre. All slashers are at heart campfire tales, the sort of overdone rickety tale-telling that you do with your friends, and as the tale is told here we see the camera move behind and around the circle of characters, having shown that Johnny is in the woods just beyond their gathering.

We only glimpse the interpersonal relationships that these characters share, for example, that one of them is going through a tough time and another doesn’t like him, a conversation glimpsed through a window of the inevitable cabin in the woods. The more traditional version of this film would show us inside the cabin and have us observe all this character stuff. In a Violent Nature reveals only what scattered bits and pieces Johnny would see or hear.

This definitely isn’t a film for everyone. There were walkouts in my screening, mostly of couples on dates. I’d hazard a guess that they were expecting a straightforward slasher piece with loud music, melodrama, and easily digestible themes. A lot of In a Violent Nature at a surface level is just walking around through beautiful cinematography (the woods have rarely looked so lovely in this genre) punctuated by extremely gory kills without much chase or mainstream-style suspense.

It’s probably too weird for casual genre fans and is aimed more squarely at those with a nigh-on obsession with the genre, as well as more critical viewers who’ll enjoy the careful and intelligent deconstruction of narrative formula. In its way, it does for the slasher film what Scream (1996) did, though inevitably with far less cultural impact.

I liked the gore, and I liked the moving nature of the monster, who despite his atrocities accords to a nature that wasn’t of his making, really. A monologue near the end of the film captures this perfectly. The title “In a Violent Nature” has two meanings, one nature itself, the other the nature of the beast. And how those two natures unite in a sad little boy called Johnny.

Rating: 3.5/4