2024 Sundance Film Festival Movie Review: In a Violent Nature
Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature has a great concept behind it: a slasher movie from the point of view of the killer. I love this idea on paper and thought In a Violent Nature was going to be another subversion of the slasher genre and a shot to the arm of one of my favorite subgenres of horror. The idea of the film works well for most of the film, but the surprisingly slow filmmaking and a botched ending stop the film from becoming a new horror classic.
The film opens with a shot of a gold necklace hanging off a piece of wood in a forest. We hear the voices of some young adults in the distance. Following their conversation, one of them grabs the necklace and they all leave. This causes our killer (Ry Barrett) to resurrect from the ground and start his rampage to get his necklace back.
Like classic cinematic killers of the past like Michael Meyers or Jason Vorhees, our killer, whose name we find out is Johnny, moves at a lumbering pace and we see him walk through these woods at this pace to each of his victims. Johnny essentially does three things in this movie: he walks, he lurks and he kills. In a Violent Nature is a “slow-cinema” horror film unlike any I’ve ever seen. Some scenes had me thinking Terrance Malick or Gus Van Sant made this movie because while incredibly slow, it is also gorgeously shot.
Johnny moves from victim to victim trying to retrieve the necklace and in doing so, delivers some of the gnarliest kills I have seen in a movie in recent years. One that stands out in particular is when one of our hapless victims is doing yoga atop a steep hill and Johnny twists and bends them in ways that will send chills down your spine.
During the scenes where Johnny is lurking at his victims or slowly walking up to them, we get the most dialog from the doomed young adults who add classic slasher exposition to the film. We learn during a campfire story that Johnny was an intellectually challenged kid who was bullied to death. We learn from a local sheriff that the necklace is from Johnny’s mother and is the only thing that keeps him at rest. It’s fun, classic slasher movie stuff that is nicely added throughout the movie.
Despite being slower than I expected due to a lot of scenes of just Johnny walking in the woods, I was enjoying the originality and filmmaking of In a Violent Nature. The sprinkles of slasher tropes mixed with a different perspective, beautiful shots, and gruesome killings were all working for me. But the film’s final few scenes, where our apparent final girl Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) gets away from Johnny, finds the film’s perspective changing to her perspective, which left me puzzled and a little annoyed. We’ve gone the whole movie from our killer’s perspective, a perspective we rarely see in slasher movies, and then it changes to the final girl like in every slasher movie. It was a very disappointing ending to a very cool and inventive slasher film.
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