In a Violent Nature

dir: Chris Nash

2024

This is a very Canadian horror flick.

I know, so many movies get filmed in Canada, pretending to be the States, pretending to be a lot of places, but this flick doesn’t hide its Canadianness at all, revelling in its time and place (north Ontario), using Canadian bands, on the (very diegetic) soundtrack, unashamed Canadian accents and presumably a heck of a lot of Canadians on and offscreen.

This is in service of great evil, this being a flick where a supernatural killer rises from the grave and brutally dispatches a bunch of people whether they deserve it or not, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have a point, at certain junctures.

To say that this flick is mostly shot from the killer’s perspective seems to misrepresent what actually happens, or is shown. It’s not through his eyes that we see all the murder and mayhem transpire: the camera follows, much of the time, from just behind him. We spend a lot of time just watching him walk places, or standing there patiently waiting to see something that means he can start butchering people.

Much of the walking happens in nature. We watch our murdering murderer quietly walk from place to place murdering. Because of this novel setup, what it means is we’re never surprised, really, when our murderer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), murders someone. From the first murder to the last, we know it’s coming, we see it happen, and at times the murderising goes on and on for absolute ages at a leisurely place.

What are we meant to make of this? If you’re a normal person, you are probably neither reading this review nor ever going to watch a film like this. What could be more disturbing to a normal person that seeing horrifying murders of innocent people at the hands of a wordless revenant, in a manner meant to elicit sympathy not for the victims, but for the monster?

To horror fans, well, a flick like this could just be the catnip we’ve been waiting for.

To the jaded, perhaps deranged fans of horror cinema, who were weaned on the brutal slasher flicks of the 70s and 80s, your Halloweens, your Fridays the 13th, your Nightmares on Elm Streets etc, this could be a refreshing take on an aged genre that has pretty much done everything to people that can be done, by now. If we’ve seen a fair few decapitations and disembowelments by now, we’ve seen thousands.

It does require a certain amount of patience, though, something which usually doesn’t go hand in hand with the horror genre. This flick reinvents nothing and radically redefines nothing.

It just does it a bit differently.

If we accept that these kinds of monstrous killers, the ones that keep coming back, the ones created when something for which they were innocent of doomed them, for which they get eternal revenge, are really not that different from being a force of nature, from the force of nature itself, then watching them at work, devoid of shocks but not of malicious intent, is like watching a lion take down a gazelle, or a landslide take out a village. It’s still horrifying, but in a novel way.

In a Violent Nature is a phrase or title that doesn’t sit pleasantly upon the ear, but I’m fairly certain they just wanted “violent” and “nature” in the same sentence. It’s impossible to ignore, however, the impact that nature plays upon the movie, upon our understanding of it.

We generally associate nature scenes with beauty, with grandeur, with a feeling of being connected to something much vaster than ourselves. We’ve heard tell for years that spending time in nature is great for our mental health, and for our physical health as well, since all these things seem to be connected. A being in nature is either in concert with it, or fighting against it, and thus at its mercy.

So who is going against nature in this flick, the victims or the killer? Maybe he’s embodying nature itself, implying none of these people should be here. The killer’s origins extend back to the days where these forests were being despoiled by loggers, and it was in fact loggers who killed our dear Johnny, if inadvertently, and it is with the trappings of the loggers and firefighters of yesteryear that Johnny wrecks his vengeance upon all and sundry.

But, yeah, it’s also against a bunch of young people staying at a cabin, and none of them own woodchip factories or toilet paper producing firms. Not a lot of clear-fell forestry workers get their comeuppance during what we watch.

The film starts with some of these ‘young’ people finding a necklace, just hanging on a pole, at a disused firewatch tower that has collapsed to the ground. The second the necklace is displaced, and that the person taking it, still unseen, is chastised by someone, saying something like “don’t you know about the massacre that happened here?”, you should not be surprised by what follows.

Horrified, but not surprised, when whatever was buried at that spot slowly makes its way out of the grave.

It is in pursuit of that necklace that Johnny does what he does, but there seems to be an extra element of malice there. The guy who tells the others, naturally, around a camp fire, the story of what happened to Johnny, a story that doesn’t make any sense, by the way, yet is still somehow proven to be true again and again, is brutally dispatched, with a drawknife, a woodworking tool. But it’s not only that he’s killed with it: he’s specifically cut through his mouth, as if to punish him for the telling. And then there’s the contemptuous way Johnny drags his parts along, flinging them through windows, as if to continue the punishment. Is this because he told the story, because he got it wrong, or because he was mostly right?

Or was it irrelevant, and just because he was there at the time, and that anyone else would have been dispatched in as brutal a manner, and thrown around as contemptuously anyway?

Later on a girl who would rather do her yoga on a clifftop than canoodle with another girl in the lake is horrifically murdered and contorted in strange, unnatural shapes, her head being forced through her navel, making her navel-gazing, her self-centredness literal. Does Johnny do this because of his contempt for her yoga form, for her cultural appropriation, because he wondered if he could make her into a pretzel (which, I assure you, he can clearly do), or because she was there at the time?

Who knows if any thoughts pass through Johnny’s mind other than rage and perfect peace. When he’s just standing there in nature he seems perfectly at rest. When he’s moving, well, it’s with dread purpose, and when he’s killing he’s an absolute demon.

I desperately hope there are no sequels to this flick, because it won’t get any better than this, but the funniest thing for me (funny curious rather than funny ha ha), is that, in a scene where two of the surviving ‘teens’ are talking with a ranger, and the ranger talks about how his father fought Johnny before, and taught him how to subdue the unkillable monster, we realise this isn’t even the first “instalment” in this story: it’s not his origin, it’s his ongoing adventures we’re watching, however long he’s been dormant.

And then what happens to the ranger, happens. It’s…not pretty. No-one deserves to go out like that, but then none of the people here deserve what happens to them. ‘Deserve’ ain’t got nothing to do with it.

And yet…

Adhering as it does to many of the tropes of this kind of horror, the last part of the flick would surprise no horror film watcher at all, but the ambiguous way in which the flick ends may prove completely unsatisfying. I don’t mean that we need ‘closure’, or some kind of resolution – one of the greatest of these of all time and forever more, being of course The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has an ending, but not resolution or closure (and is far more satisfying, but that’s by-the-by), and yet we have our ending, and are left hanging anyway. I don’t have that much of a problem with it, it’s just that for most of the film we’ve followed Johnny as he silently goes from task to task, and then in the last ten minutes we’re with two other characters just driving around, talking lots. It’s a very different energy.

And that’s after a harrowing sequence where the Final Girl runs around for ages trying to flee the sounds of Johnny chopping up her boyfriend, and yet she seems to be running around in a circle, always coming back to that horrible sound.

It goes only to show that nature should always be avoided at all costs, because eventually it kills all of us, and never really liked us anyway.

8 times In a Violent Nature is grimly comical, gratuitous and utterly glorious out of 10

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“You guys never heard of The White Pines Slaughter?” – by that point, they’re already dead, because curiousity killed everyone - In a Violent Nature