Critics reviews

Homaging classic horrors like Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while smartly subverting their rhythms and ingeniously switching viewpoint from victims to killer, writer-director Chris Nash has delivered a debut to pin you to your seat... It’s rare for something this necrotic to feel this fresh.

To say there’s a mismatch between the message behind the filmmakers’ borrowed arthouse syntax and the thrust of up-your-nose flesh shredding and plasma spraying is to easily exhaust this film’s tiny tank of gas. You could even call it hypocritical. Slasher movies’ use of suffering to muster shocked chuckles has never thrilled me, even as a kid, and here, as elsewhere, we occupy a dumb world where heads pop and spew as though they were water balloons filled with cherry Kool-Aid.

Delightfully stomach-churning scenes only highlight how the film fails us by cutting away often, and refusing to purely contrast them with Johnny’s silent hunt. There’s a version of In A Violent Nature that truly accomplishes its stated goal of following the killer in a slasher. As it stands, the movie fails both as a dumb fun slasher and as a formal experiment, leaving us with something that’s kind of nothing.

The fact that In a Violent Nature sets up a storytelling style that utilizes highbrow aesthetics while still keeping one foot firmly planted in the genre gutter is what makes this feel like a once-in-generation slasher flick. Some may grouse that it concludes not with a big bang but a quiet whimper, yet even that’s a purposeful feint and parry away from what we’ve been led to expect from the usual final-girl conclusions.

"Violent Nature" ends up one of the most fascinating, oddly serene horror entries of the year so far, precisely because it flips the mechanics of the slasher on their head and asks you to imagine what it'd be like to be Jason Voorhees -- a simple, demonically-risen man who gets up and clocks into work every day to do what he does best: disembowel.

Nash has also been compared to those filmmakers reductively (and sometimes dismissively) referred to as part of slow cinema, emphasizing long takes that are antithetical to the lightning-fast edits of most slashers. But, to paraphrase Paul Schrader on that cinematic school, you can take forever as long as the payoff is worth the wait.

For horror fans, it’s a rare treat and a fantastic exercise in taking a genre in the opposite direction that everyone else has tried. In a Violent Nature may not spawn a franchise of Johnny resurrections, but there’s a good chance that every slasher that comes after it will take small bits of influence from the things In a Violent Nature does well.

More provocative than jump-scary, the film’s best moments unfold with dark humor and inspired transitions enhanced by a scoreless elemental sound design by Michelle Hwu and Tim Atkins. So it’s frustrating and distracting when flat direction, inconsistent effects and wooden acting break the spell, making it more and more of a slog to stay interested.

Nash doesn’t attempt to tangle up the ugliness at the black heart of what’s made Slashers tick for so long. All the tropes are here... What Nash does instead is pull the simplest of tricks (and pulls it off to boot)—he takes all of those tropes and just simply looks at them from the other side, putting us (relentlessly, gruelingly) into the point-of-view of the killer himself.

There is a calm implacability to “In a Violent Nature” that’s deeply unsettling and particularly unpleasant. Yet I was also transfixed: Chris Nash’s direction is so persuasively bold — brazen, really — and bloodcurdlingly coolheaded that his unusual shocker is impossible to dismiss.

Despite the film’s knowing edge, it’s still really scary to follow a hooded, hook-wielding butcher through the woods... In a Violent Nature judiciously spreads out its kills, but when they arrive, they are extremely nasty, achieved with impressive practical effects and a methodical, straightforward presentation.

In a Violent Nature doesn’t so much repudiate the genre’s basic essence as distill it down into its purist, most elemental form. It’s part art film, part splatter fest, the work of a true believer who seems determined to tweak a long-standing formula just enough to offer a new perspective. It’s a fascinating experiment, although its success is at least partially contingent on an audience’s patience and appetite for extremely aggressive bodily harm.