Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is out in Park City, Utah, covering the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
Elevated horror has gotten a bad rap over the last few years. Now, I agree that the term is bullshit – it’s the “graphic novel” of the film world, meant to flatter an “educated” consumer and make them feel like they’re watching a proper work of art rather than the muck that those losers at horror conventions consume passively – but occasionally it is really quite helpful as a descriptor. This is because no one, outside of critical circles, enjoys it: It’s the Goldilocks problem, with the horror-loving mama bears frustrated by the slow speed and the avant-garde choices, and the artsy papa bears angered by the fact that, at the end of the day, it’s still a horror picture, complete with gore and deliciously ugly sensibilities. But for a select few, these types of movies will excite them in ways that your normal arthouse fare or multiplex horror films typically do, and they’re the kind of flick that gets a cult following that both mama and papa bears are mystified by. Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is one of those films, and I’m one of the baby bears who loves it.
To play an all-to-common rhetorical game among critics, Nash’s film is essentially what might result if, should the rights situation ever be properly worked out, Jonathan Glazer was asked to helm the next Friday the 13th movie and agreed to do so. It’s a deconstruction of the quick pace of the slasher, with much of the film centering on following an unknown killer as he wanders through the woods and around campsites and ranger stations. When I say “following,” I mean it literally: much of the movie is set in third-person view, following him from behind at a slight remove, as the sounds of the breeze swaying through the leaves, the chirps of the birds and the hum of the insects filling the quiet. The film sticks close to his perspective for much of the runtime, with most exposition delivered from conversations he overhears. The performers playing the normies/victims – an angry old coot who lays bear traps in the worst possible spots, a group of millennials renting a cabin for the weekend who, predictably, are drunken morons, and a park ranger with a long-held grudge against the killer – are all surprisingly naturalistic, with the audience feeling like proper voyeurs when we glean information from campfire tales or, in the case of the opening scene, in which some of the millennials accidentally awaken the killer, overheard from a static shot, where none of them are glimpsed on screen.
I’d say this is about 50 minutes of the movie, which is just roughly more than half of it, and is much more than needed to piss off every person who has real dumb opinions about Halloween sequels. On the other hand, the other half will make the arthouse-goer wish they’d brought a barf bag. See, Nash hasn’t forgotten that he’s making a slasher movie, and this isn’t an It Comes at Night situation (as much as I like that movie): When he gets down and dirty, you’ll feel muck-and-blood covered. The kills are ferocious, and, even better, they feel as if they were plucked from a lost Video Nasty vault, so intense that they made the monocles pop off the cheekbones of the British censors. They’re set up and established traditionally, for the most part, with the requisite dark humor and healthy irony present, and the only difference coming from their extremity. I’m guessing a good chunk of In a Violent Nature’s budget was spent on these moments, which blows anything I’ve seen at this festival out of the water regarding the VFX and makeup work. You know you have something special when, in a room full of seasoned horror nerds and critics, every single person is hooting and hollering with shock and weird delight.
The only real misstep comes near the end, in which a diversion is taken that is in keeping with the film’s ethos yet executed with a little less vigor than one might hope – it’s a moment in which we catch our breath and let tension build, following a scene in which someone flees through the woods ala Under the Skin – but Nash recovers beautifully, with a haunting and tension-filled final few moments that strike at the core horror of the notion of “the final girl.” It’s in these scenes that I think the Glazer influence emerges the most, though I’d also agree with some of my peers that there’s some Malick present in the aesthetic stew, as the violence of the killer contrasts with the serenity of the deep forest. Like Under the Skin, In a Violent Nature gives us an abstract view into a different kind of consciousness, with the alien being substituted for a resurrected mass-murderer hellbent on a form of simplistic revenge. This is my preferred view of the movie, with a lot of the silence echoing the void that is our protagonist, with one or two moments of true character-establishment emerging along the way. There’s a strangely heartbreaking moment in which we’re reminded of the reality of this character in a way that is genuinely effective (and surprisingly unexplored in so many horror films that feature similar supernatural murders): It reminds us of his former innocence, as his dead and cloudy eyes comprehends something he found on the ground and begins to play with.
It’s gorgeous stuff, and I cannot wait to see the five people at each screening who manage to dodge all the tossed popcorn and berets from the snobs on either side of them and emerge freaking the fuck out about this make their own riffs on it. In a Violent Nature just feels like one of those movies.