In A Violent Nature
The sounds of nature, birds, a distant river, leaves blowing in the wind, and voices, two men looking around the remains of an old fire tower in which a gold chain and medallion dangles from a metal pipe plunged deep in the soil and fallen leaves; one of them surreptitiously removing it before they pair depart, they do not witness the shifting earth as the thing pinned beneath rises to the surface, awoken from restless death.
Around the campfire that night they recount the story of the horror of the White Pines Conservation Area, how after the slow kid Johnny, son of a local merchant, was bullied and blamed and finally lured to his death in an act of spiteful revenge over an accident, all the men involved found dead two weeks later, torn apart, his vengeful spirit supposedly still haunting the woods and blamed for subsequent deaths.
Exploring horror through the eyes of Johnny and his victims, depicting instinctive behaviour In A Violent Nature as the camera follows just behind the shambling shape in tattered and muddy rags as it trudges between the trees, gathering weapons, axes and drag hooks, the tools of the lumberjack trade deployed in a manner for which they were not intended, in the same way writer and director Chris Nash has attempted to shape the tropes of the slasher genre into something different.
Presented akin to a first-person shooter video game, the camera most often hovering just behind Johnny (The Hoard’s Ry Barrett) as he takes his mask from the ancient gallery and walks on down the hall, a day in the life of an unstoppable serial killer is apparently quite tedious, with no attempt to twist, subvert or freshen the situations established by Friday the 13th and echoed down through the decades and now captured in long takes of still life and slow moving death, the weight of the dragged body becoming emblematic of the film.
While not a found footage film, In A Violent Nature falls into many of the same traps of such, the supporting characters lifeless even before the killing begins, drinking, smoking, taunting and teasing but without personality, servants to the slaughter but nothing more, creatures bound by invariant habit as much as Johnny, never attuned to the sounds of what is creeping up behind them and apparently completely without peripheral vision, so often does Johnny hover in plain sight where only a slight turn of the head would reveal his approach and save them.
Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan) having learned survival skills from Meredith Vickers, a woman unable to run in anything other than a straight line, the manner of her death indicates she was born not only without sense but also a ribcage, but while In A Violent Nature is graphic, bloody and occasionally preposterous it could never be accused of being titillating regardless of how explicit and graphic the frequent murders are because the only thing more inescapable than plaid clad woodland killer Johnny is how dull the film is.
In A Violent Nature will be on general release from Friday 12th July
