Exclusively In Theaters on May 31st from IFC Films.
When you’re a slasher movie buff as I have been for thirty years, you become convinced that you’ve seen it all. Every new kind of effect or aesthetic has been approached, all with varying degrees of success. So when a movie like “In a Violent Nature” comes around and changes your mind, it’s quite a special occasion. Chris Nash sets out to not only re-think the slasher movie, but deconstruct it, and succeeds with flying colors. He the best horror movie of the year, a nihilistic, gory, viciously mean slasher movie that’s also incredibly creepy, and downright haunting in its commentary about the unpredictability of nature.
By the end of the movie, I was not only completely invested in the journey of unstoppable slasher Johnny, but I was also teeming with anxiety in how Chris Nash managed to pain the wilderness as an extension of slasher johnny’s unstoppable campaign of violence and dismemberment. The premise for “In a Violent Nature” is deceptively old school. A group of vacationers in the Canadian wilderness happen upon a collapsed fire tower where they discover a seemingly mint condition antique locket.
Against their better judgment, they take it. Unknowingly when it’s removed from its resting spot, the hulking rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it. The mindless monster armed with his own maiming devices, hones in on the group of vacationing teens responsible for the theft and proceeds to methodically slaughter them one by one in his mission to get it back – along with anyone in his way.
“In a Violent Nature” is a downright mean, vicious slasher film–probably one of the meanest I’ve seen since “Hatchet,” and in every way it manages to surpass it in how it pays tribute to slashers of the past, while also successfully carving out its own mythology.
To boot, Johnny is an incredibly scary slasher, one that is an absolute force of nature that we’re never quite made one hundred percent sure of in how he functions, and whether or not he’s imprisoned in the wilderness or is empowered by it. Director-Writer Nash’s slasher film is really damn creepy, while also teeming with sheer paranoia that we don’t often get too much with the slasher sub-genre. The whole concept of fall out from being a victim of a slasher, and their permanent trauma that they’ll forever be cursed with is perfectly punctuated with such menacing silence, and stillness that is absolutely haunting.
The final scene is also particularly beautifully staged as it signals a narrative that will continue long after the movie has ended. So many of the scenes are so beautifully shot and photographed, it’s astonishing how stunning director Nash and cinematographer Pierce Derks take care in establishing the wilderness and world Johnny resides in. Kudos to Ry Barret who is enormous as the horrendous Johnny. “In a Violent Nature” is by far one of the best horror outings I’ve seen all year; it stuck with me hours after I’d finished it and kept me lingering on certain ideas and concepts that helped flesh out this mesmerizing vision.