In A Violent Nature (2024)
shades of Friday the 13th
In a Violent Nature is the closest thing to a Friday the 13th movie we’ve gotten in 15 years. The plot is typical slasher movie fodder. A rowdy group of teenage campers find and take a mysterious locket that they find amidst some rubble. In doing so, they accidentally disturb the resting place of Johnny (Ry Barrett), a hulking undead mass murderer.
After rising from the grave, Johnny stomps through the Ontario wilderness. He stalks and dispatches the teens (and anyone else who gets in his way) while in pursuit of the precious locket which, the movie later explains, was once owned by his mother.
It’s Not Your Average Slasher Movie
Countless summer camp slasher movies have been released in the past four decades. Thankfully, In A Violent Nature finds a way to differentiate itself. Most of the film is shot from the perspective of the killer. The camera is usually positioned behind Johnny, as if there’s a documentary filmmaker following him as he trudges through the woods.
Killer POV shots are nothing new in slasher movies, of course, but having the vast majority of the film shot this way is certainly unusual. The movie does shift perspectives a few times, especially toward the end, when we start to see the story through the eyes of the movie’s final girl, Kris (Andrea Pavlovic).
A Slasher Stripped Down to the Core
In a Violent Nature contains numerous sequences of Johnny wandering aimlessly through the woods. The film could have easily cut some of this material out without losing anything of value. These scenes tested my patience.
So did the fact that this movie has no musical score. A horror movie with no score seems almost unthinkable. How are you going to build excitement and suspense without music?
In this case, however, that’s exactly the point. The bells and whistles that conventional slashers use aren’t present here. We don’t get the cliched jump scares, sharp musical notes signaling an imminent attack, or even a conventional climactic showdown between the villain and the final girl.
What we do get are some extremely gory kills. Some of Johnny’s murders are actually quite tame, but others are jaw-droppingly brutal.
And yet Johnny’s rampage often feels strangely routine, as if we are watching him shop for groceries. The film depicts violence as prosaic and mundane. The banality of Johnny’s evil is evident throughout.
That said, the disguise that Johnny finds and wears (an old-fashioned firefighter mask) is awesome. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Spirit Halloween and other costume outlets sell this mask in the future.
An Unusual conclusion
The most unorthodox part of this movie is the ending. Mild spoilers ahead, but I’ll leave out major details to avoid giving away too much.
Kris is limping through the woods, desperately trying to stay ahead of Johnny. Despite the lack of music, this scene is very tense and suspenseful. Kris eventually encounters a mysterious woman, who is portrayed by Friday the 13th alum Lauren Marie Taylor. She plays Vickie, a plucky flirt who is the love interest of wheelchair-bound Mark (the late Tom McBride), in Friday the 13th Part 2.
As they attempt to leave the forest, the woman tells Kris a tale about a bear. This story is apparently intended as an allegory to explain Johnny’s violent nature.
The film concludes with a hauntingly ambiguous final image that appears to be setting up a sequel. The ending surprised me. It’s a bit anticlimactic. But a definitive conclusion wouldn’t have felt right for this weird movie.
The film’s final moments can be interpreted in a number of ways. We will need to wait for a sequel (if there is one) to get some true closure to Johnny’s story.
Rating
In a Violent Nature breaks all the rules and gets away with it. It confounds expectations by taking a familiar storyline and spinning it into something new. By having the guts to take a fresh approach, it carves itself a unique place in the slasher pantheon. But don’t watch it if you are in the mood for a conventional slasher movie.
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 7.5
