Slasher films often fall between creepy moments due to weak plots and cardboard characters meant to give structural integrity to their shocking content. “In a Violent Nature” avoids those pitfalls by almost completely sidestepping the standard niceties of narrative and psychological detail. There's an explanatory, albeit piecemeal and possibly inaccurate, backstory, but otherwise, writer-director Chris Nash's debut feature tackles the usual gory business with a kind of minimalist purity, made possible by focusing almost entirely on the point of view of an unstoppable killing machine.
It's a tactic that could easily become monotonous. However, this Canadian indie manages to keep us engaged, inducing fear in viewers, if not a lot of outright terror. The Shudder Original, which will premiere in Sundance's Midnight section, is scheduled to begin streaming on that genre platform sometime this spring.
Director: Chris Nash
Writer: Chris Nash
Stars: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love
It seems like we're back in "Blair Witch" territory at the beginning (and again during a panicked stretch at the end), as off-camera hikers pick through the ruins of a wildfire tower. One of them sees a necklace hanging from a pipe, which he puts in his pocket before leaving. Our suspicion that removing this talisman might be a bad idea soon bears fruit, as immediately afterwards the ground shakes and the figure of a man covered in dirt emerges from his grave. He lumbers toward a decrepit house on the edge of these parks (where the entity once lived, we can tell) where a local poacher has the misfortune of faking it.
This first death is not graphic, but that moderation will not last long. That night, the demon is attracted to a campfire outside a cabin, and introduces us to seven young adults staying there. One of them (Sam Roulston as Ehren) tells the local legend of the "White Pine Massacre", in which several lumberjacks picked on the "mentally impaired" son of a store owner several years earlier. Their pranks inadvertently led to the boy's death, falling from the aforementioned fire tower, followed by the mysterious slaughter of the men. (Later in the present day, a ranger played by Reece Presley develops this story further.)
Needless to say, our mute, implacable criminal (Ry Barrett) is that wronged Johnny who returns to his vengeful half-life, causing serious physical harm to anyone he encounters. Breaking into a ranger station, he acquires rusty tools of historical value turned display case murderer. The ensuing chaos is vivid, to say the least. While not all of the gory prosthetic effects are entirely convincing, Nash's penchant for long, sustained takes encompasses some seamless transition shots between a visibly intact actor and gruesome consequences.
Naturally, there's a Final Girl (Andrea Pavlovic as Kris). But since we're almost completely trapped in the perspective of the undead killer, primarily from a moving camera position behind him as he crawls through the forest, these frequently petulant and argumentative victims never require much dimensionality. Their eventual realization that something is very wrong occurs primarily off-screen, with the dialogue heard briefly moments before they face lethal danger.
Aside from the aforementioned spoken story stretches, the only extended verbal interlude comes from Lauren Taylor in a late appearance as a passing Good Samaritan. Her monologue goes further in terms of the risk of dissipating the creepy atmosphere. Still, ultimately, the atmosphere of menace is maintained long enough to cause an unsettling and eerie fade.
Using a nearly square aspect ratio, cinematographer Pierce Derks makes the wilds of northern Ontario charming and sinister, with enough variety in visual tactics that the film never gets bogged down in a camera's stylistic rut. first-person found footage horror. The complete lack of original music (some incidental music is heard on radios and so on) mainly accentuates the tension.
“Violent Nature” isn't exactly the scariest horror on screen; It doesn't have much humor or complexity. However, its stripped-down approach to a familiar essence has a distinctiveness that is impressive and is sure to please fans who are always up for a new horror movie but wish most of them weren't so interchangeable.
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