In A Vio­lent Nature review – great premise, poor execution

It is a truth uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged that a group of sexy teens in a for­est must be in want of a men­ac­ing killer to stalk them. In his intrigu­ing fea­ture debut In A Vio­lent Nature, film­mak­er Chris Nash riffs on this right from the jump, as a hulk­ing silent men­ace is inad­ver­tent­ly res­ur­rect­ed in a remote area of wood­land after a jock pock­ets a lock­et hang­ing under an aban­doned fire tow­er. He pro­ceeds to deter­mined­ly trudge through the idyl­lic for­est, a man pos­sessed, return­ing to the home he once shared with his lov­ing moth­er, who gave him the neck­lace which has now been stolen – and we watch over his shoul­der, hyp­no­tised by the sound of heavy feet thud­ding against the ground.

There’s cer­tain­ly a nov­el­ty to Nash’s nat­u­ral­is­tic set-up, inspired by the work of Ter­ence Mal­ick and Gus Van Sant, which sees its min­i­mal bud­get as a fea­ture rather than a bug and posi­tions the audi­ence to share the killer’s POV rather than the vic­tims’. Filmed in the pic­turesque wilder­ness of rur­al Ontario with a skele­ton cast and crew, the ten­sion of what’s lurk­ing just beyond the tree­line is under­cut by the gen­tle rus­tle of trees in the breeze and birds singing hap­pi­ly in the sum­mer sun. The inter­change­able sexy teens do what inter­change­able sexy teens do, shar­ing beers by the camp­fire and strip­ping off to swim in the lake. And the men­ac­ing killer does what a men­ac­ing killer does: he stalks and kills them, some­times in par­tic­u­lar­ly cre­ative fash­ion. There’s even the pre­req­ui­site spooky ori­gin sto­ry, deliv­ered by one of the kids – from this, we learn ​“John­ny” was an intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled young man killed by some local boys in a prac­ti­cal joke gone wrong. His unset­tled spir­it has returned to enact revenge before, and the lock­et hap­haz­ard­ly left beneath the tow­er was the only thing keep­ing him in the ground.

Yet there’s some­thing under­whelm­ing about Johnny’s ram­shackle ram­page, which is under­pinned by an ani­mal urge to kill, all but explained in a late mono­logue by a side char­ac­ter. While there can be some­thing ter­ri­fy­ing about a thin­ly sketched vil­lain – such as Jason in the orig­i­nal Fri­day the Thir­teenth or Michael Myers in Hal­loween – here we are giv­en no rea­son to care either way who lives or dies, instead bar­ing wit­ness to the slaugh­ter with no invest­ment in what hap­pens. The riff on clas­sic hor­ror tropes is nov­el, but not enough to sus­tain a 94-minute fea­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the ham­my dia­logue and act­ing push­es up against Pierce Derks’ crisp, rev­er­ent cin­e­matog­ra­phy, dis­play­ing the Cana­di­an wilder­ness in all its glo­ry. The film boasts excel­lent tech­ni­cal work through­out, notably in the sound design (all the more promi­nent as In A Vio­lent Nature for­goes a tra­di­tion­al score) and the spe­cial effects (there are impres­sive two gory set­pieces, though more would have been quite wel­come to com­pen­sate for the sedate pace and hack­neyed acting).

And kudos to Ry Bar­rett, who stomps through the for­est with as much panache as a man can while wear­ing a vision-obscur­ing Vajen Bad­er smoke pro­tec­tor. He’s saved from the film’s delib­er­ate­ly bad dia­logue by virtue of being a silent char­ac­ter, and the deci­sion to out­fit him in a spooky vin­tage fire hel­met gives the film a piece of ready-made icon­ic imagery. The film’s final scene is also a chill­ing sub­ver­sion of nor­mal expec­ta­tions for the cli­max of a camp­ground slash­er, but the lack­lus­tre 90 min­utes that pre­cede it mean that by the time we trudge to the forest’s bound­aries, there’s lit­tle rea­son to care who comes out of the blood bath on top.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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