The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
This is a classic example of a concept that seems much cooler on paper than it does in execution. In a Violent Nature is a slasher movie from the perspective of the slasher. More specifically, it is basically like watching a Friday the 13th movie if you were following Jason around instead of the campers. In theory, that sounds like a really fun idea. In reality, however, it is pretty goddamn boring.
There really isn’t much to discuss in terms of plot. We open with a couple of young people (the equivalent of Jason’s campers) taking a necklace that’s hanging in the middle of the forest. Once they leave, a killer rises from the ground and begins a search for the stolen necklace that marked his otherwise unmarked grave. That’s about it. The rest of the movie is the resurrected killer searching aimlessly for the necklace and killing anyone that he stumbles upon.
Let me first address the positive and there is one really big positive. In a Violent Nature is unrated (meaning that it would have received an NC-17 rating had it gone through the ratings process) and it is absolutely brutal. The kills are nearly on the level of the Terrifier movies and that is damn refreshing in a year when I had to sit through infantile horror movies like Night Swim and Imaginary. I have seen a lot of horror films (according to my Letterboxd account, I have seen 1,094 of them) and there are kills in this movie that I have never seen before and I have to give kudos to this killer for the level of thought that he puts into his work. If “zombie-slasher” was an occupation, this motherfucker would deserve a raise. One girl gets her head ripped through her own body in one of the most inventive kills that I’ve ever seen. One guy gets a ridiculously protracted death with a tree-cutting machine and the killer is considerate enough to demonstrate the machine for the audience before using it on the victim. Even when the killer does something more traditional like putting an axe into a guy’s face, one hit from the axe isn’t enough. Oh no, he repeatedly hits him until his head is little more than a red puddle. In the age of PG-13 horror for children, In a Violent Nature deserves recognition for its over-the-top gore and excellent effects.
Unfortunately, the kill scenes are only about 10 minutes worth of a 95-minute movie. If you have ever wondered what Jason is doing between the kill scenes in a Friday the 13th movie, it turns out that he is walking. A lot of walking. Much of In a Violent Nature is composed of extended scenes of over-the shoulder shots of the killer walking through the woods and it loses its novelty pretty damn quickly. The film largely feels like watching somebody play a video game as the audience watches a character slowly walk to their next destination. I know that it has become popular online to simply watch other people play a game, but I don’t understand the appeal there and I certainly don’t understand it in a slasher movie. I love Zelda games, but it would be torture for someone to watch my obsessive ass play it for 200 hours to find every item.
This approach also eliminates anything that usually holds the audience’s attention between kills in a good slasher movie. We learn very little about the characters or their relationships to each other because we only get glimpses of them through the eyes of the killer. The only thing that we do learn is that they seem to be insufferable GenZ/SJW stereotypes that can’t be killed off quickly enough. As much as character development in slasher movies is often mocked by critics, the good ones (Black Christmas, Halloween, My Bloody Valentine, etc.) do have well-written characters that the audience cares about. In a Violent Nature barely has characters at all and certainly doesn’t have characters that will be missed after their death. This is, I suppose, partially a necessary consequence of the film’s structure, but that doesn’t make it any more entertaining to watch.
I don’t want to spoil the ending (and I use the word “spoil” loosely), but I need to vaguely comment on possibly one of the most baffling writing choices in recent cinema. The climax includes a painfully long scene of a random woman describing an instance when her brother was attacked by a bear. It is absolutely mind-boggling how long this scene goes on for; it feels like a fucking eternity and I checked my watch several times just during this bear monologue that has fuck all to do with anything else in the movie. I don’t know if this was included and extended to get the movie over 90 minutes, but good god was this painful to sit through.
In a Violent Nature could have been a great short film, but there is just not enough material here for a feature-length movie. If you’re looking for a fun slasher movie, then this aint it. This is more of an experimental indie film than a crowd-pleasing horror movie. The gore scenes would be worth watching as a highlight reel, but you will likely be bored to tears by the rest of the movie unless you have a thing watching people hike through the woods or have keen interest in absurdly long bear-attack stories.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Violent_Nature#/media/File:In_a_Violent_Nature_(2024)_poster.jpg
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