‘In A Violent Nature’ has the year’s most intense ending

Chris Nash’s inverted slasher In A Violent Nature — one of the year’s most inventive horror films — is now available on VOD. It’s a relief it wasn’t a bigger hit, or else it might have done for forest trails what Spielberg’s Jaws once did for sharks. A deeply unsettling work told mostly from the perspective of a bloodthirsty killer, it recalls the premise and iconography of major masked villains across the decades, but wraps its story in the visual parlance of atmospheric “slow cinema,” resulting less in startling thrills and more in creeping existential dread.

The film’s use of POV has been much-discussed, but its ending is equally strange and subversive, adding a unique exclamation point to the whole affair. In A Violent Nature, through its genre deconstructions and surprisingly considered visual approach, nestles a story of — as its title suggests — the nature of violence, both as a human impulse and as a catalyst for horror cinema. All of this leads to a quiet crescendo, in the form of an unbearably tense vice grip that never yields, even once the credits have rolled.

Here’s Johnny: In A Violent Nature‘s instantly-iconic killer

Slasher films live or die based on their central killers. While more recent mainstays like Jigsaw and Ghostface (from the Saw and Scream films, respectively) have an intellect bent with complex motives (relatively speaking), classic villains like Friday the 13th‘s Jason Voorhees, Halloween‘s Michael Meyers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s Leatherface embody a sense of unstoppable malice.

Johnny from In A Violent Nature belongs to that latter group, beginning with his emergence from being buried beneath the ground — a rebirth into what is eventually revealed to be a vicious cycle of killings — and because he seems instinctively driven to slash his way through the Ontario wilderness. It also helps that he has a memorable outfit: simple, tattered lumberjack plaid turned mysterious thanks to a vintage firefighter mask and the chained grip hooks that accompany it.

Credit: Pierce Derks/IFC Films/Shudder

Equally accessorized with the rusty and rustic, he lumbers his way through thickets and campsites — accompanied by Michelle Hwu’s ambient sound design — in the hopes of recovering a locket from a band of rowdy twentysomethings who unknowingly picked it up. The item, through one brief daydream, is revealed as tied to his childhood. This motive, at first, seems like a conveniently tacked on explanation to justify his steady rampage, but his very first on-screen kill is disguised with unexpected panache. With his victim helplessly caught in a bear trap, Johnny reaches for his face, only for the movie to cut to several minutes later, as the killer’s stout and rotting hand — now soaked in blood — reaches for a locket he thinks is his, in one continuous motion.

This oblique cut is the first of several that denies the viewer the complete satisfaction of on-screen gore (don’t fret; there’s still plenty of that), but it also lends credence to the idea that something palpable, and perhaps fundamentally human, lies beneath Johnny’s inhumane compulsions. That Johnny seems, at first, Terminator-esque in his one-tracked drive is also a function of Nash initially refusing to reveal the killer’s face, even when he’s unmasked. However, the film reveals Johnny’s monstrous complexion at a moment that challenges the implications of his appearance. The first time we see his glassy eyes, infected teeth, and decomposing flesh happens to be when he sits down to play with a toy car. Like Jason and Leatherface, he appears to be constrained by arrested development.

None of this changes his or the movie’s overarching trajectory — Johnny soon continues his vicious killing spree — but fleshing the character out this way is part and parcel of the movie’s injection of melancholy into what might otherwise be cheap thrills.

In A Violent Nature is aesthetically rich slasher cinema

In A Violent Nature has a few of the most hilariously inventive kills in slasher cinema, but it also wrestles with its own violence in uncomfortable ways. There is, perhaps, only one death that plays out to its fullest potential in terms of sick satisfaction (the lady on the ledge; you’ll know it when you see it), because for the most part, the film is designed to deny the thrilling release of on-screen bloodshed.

One kill unfolds entirely underwater, out of view. Another, up against a tree, cuts away during its most squelching moments. If he’s in search of some catharsis, Johnny’s drive to violence seems to help him almost achieve it, but each kill requires another. Nash’s placement of the camera enhances this sense of forward momentum; we’re almost always following Johnny from behind as he marches toward some unattainable goal.

Along the way, Nash and cinematographer Pierce Derks’ use of digital noise replicates film grain, ramping up the visual tension even within stillness — as though the frame were pulsing and alive — while giving the movie a photographic quality reminiscent of celluloid. While shot on the Canon C70, it resembles an eerie 16-millimeter found footage discovery, further enhanced by its narrow 4:3 aspect ratio. This mimicry of film extends to the use of halation: sunlight pierces the corners of the frame in uncanny ways, creating a halo effect around Johnny, making him seem like a creature plucked out of time — like something that has always existed in these woods.

While there’s arguably a finite timeline to Johnny’s story — rumors and urban legends place his origin a few decades prior — nothing precludes his evocation of a Michael Meyers-esque embodiment of evil, who revels in (or at least, tries to revel in) his vicious handiwork. These echoes burrow their way under your skin, and become all the more viscerally upsetting as the film begins to focus on death not just as entertainment but as inevitability.

The aforementioned woman on the ledge (Charlotte Creaghan), though she becomes a victim of cartoonish brutality, has a rare and poignant moment of acceptance right before her death. She doesn’t resist. A later victim, the Park Ranger (Reece Presley), becomes the center of one of the most ghastly and sadistic on-screen killings in recent slasher cinema, though not because of its actual bloodshed. Rather, Johnny breaks the Ranger’s spine, paralyzing him and forcing him, and us, to watch — in an unbroken three-minute take — as he’s slowly dismembered (and eventually, beheaded) by logging equipment. He can’t resist either.

Accompanied only by mechanical rumbling, this kill in particular completes the movie’s transformation from something thrilling, wherein death lurks around every corner, to something deeply sad, in which the camera unflinchingly portrays death head on, with no possibility of escape. All of this builds to the movie’s stunning climax, a final 20 minutes that proves intensely nerve-wracking, despite the fact that Johnny isn’t even on screen. 

Credit: Pierce Derks/IFC Films/Shudder

In A Violent Nature ramps up the intensity during its quiet climax

The movie’s “final girl,” Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) is, like her group of friends, marked for death by her proximity to the man who initially stole Johnny’s locket. When she realizes the kind of unrelenting force she’s up against, Kris runs away as fast as she can, all but leaving the movie’s core premise behind. But before she escapes, the camera lingers on her unbroken stare, as Johnny executes her friend. There’s something fearfully paralyzing about what she sees, but also, on the level of an audience expecting cathartic payoff, there’s something enrapturing too — Kris lingers just a hair longer than any real person might.

As she runs helter-skelter through the darkened woods, the film briefly resembles the claustrophobic horrors of The Blair Witch Project, but it soon allows her an escape when she reaches a dirt road and flags down a pickup truck, à la the original Texas Chain Saw. During these climactic moments, there are plenty of shots that feel like they could serve as emphatic final images — from Johnny slashing away at a long-dead victim, to Kris charging through the forest (and eventually, standing still on the road) — thus concluding the movie in a state of unrest.

However, Nash prolongs this restlessness well beyond what might feel most rhythmic, or cinematically “correct,” by essentially extending the movie beyond its natural life, into an extra act as Kris hitches a ride with a helpful woman (Lauren Taylor, of Friday the 13th Part 2). It’s here, perhaps more than any other moment in the film, that the genre’s expectations come charging into play, from the slasher’s proclivity for “one final scare” to the creeping suspicion of an accomplice (the driver seems to be familiar with the dangers lurking in the woods).

Through shaky, claustrophobic closeups, Nash ratchets up the nauseating tension amidst this car ride, during which it feels violence could erupt at any moment. The aforementioned sound design, involving rusting trees and trilling insects, becomes louder and more harrowing, as though the forest itself were cursed. By sticking with Johnny’s perspective through most of the film, Nash turns the concept of the cinematic gaze into something malevolent. When the movie finally leaves Johnny behind, switching its POV to Kris, it can’t help but echo this sensation, a lingering feeling verging on the desire for on-screen violence. Watching these final minutes unfold involves not just expecting some vicious eruption, but on some level, yearning for it, as though it were the only possible escape from Kris’ newfound paranoia.

This is, on one hand, a deft aesthetic embodiment of the way trauma seeps its way into your bones. But it is also wildly self-reflexive as a postscript to a horror film, as though Johnny’s unrelenting thoughts of violence had, in some way, been transferred to Kris’ psyche, through the mere act of her witnessing his executions — as an enraptured audience member cursed with the instinct to look away, but the desire to keep watching.

How to watch: In a Violent Nature is available to rent/buy on Amazon, Apple TV, Vudu, and Microsoft.