Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Chris Nash
Starring: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone,
Charlotte Creaghan
Recounting his first time performing as a nervous young pianist on stage
with Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock claimed that halfway through the show the
legendary trumpeter leaned over his shoulder and whispered the words
"Don't play the butter notes kid." Initially puzzled, Hancock tried to
wrap his head around what Davis meant by this odd instruction. Then it
clicked. Davis was telling the piano prodigy to leave out the obvious
notes, to create something fresh through omission. Hancock had been
playing jazz for a while by that point, but that was the day he finally
understood jazz.
With his feature debut, In a Violent Nature, writer/director Chris Nash has crafted a slasher movie
that omits the butter notes. The elements we're told are essential for a
good horror movie - a creepy score, relatable characters, murders cut with
violent editing - are dispensed with here as Nash pares the sub-genre down
to its most basic, primal appeal, that of seeing a lumbering, homicidal
maniac rent asunder the bodies of a group of twentysomethings.
On paper In a Violent Nature is a rather unoriginal backwoods slasher in which vacationing
youngsters are slaughtered by the physical embodiment of a legend
whispered around campfires. We've seen this sort of thing in countless
early '80s slashers like The Burning and Madman. What makes In a Violent Nature stand out is its formal approach. Nash eschews convention and takes
his cues from Alan Clarke's Elephant, his camera following the film's antagonist, a resurrected killer named
Johnny (Ry Barrett), as he takes bloody revenge on the pesky kids
who unwittingly disturbed his resting place.
As with the Irish terrorists of Elephant, or the school shooters of Gus Van Sant's 2003 reworking of Clarke's
film, we spend a lot of time traipsing behind the hulking Johnny as he
wanders through the woods in search of victims. The film's one concession
to narrative convention comes early as we witness a group of young campers
tell creepy campfire stories, one of which recounts the backstory of
Johnny, who like the antagonists of so many slasher movies was the victim
of a prank gone terribly wrong. For most of the movie we're tagging along
with Johnny as he circles the periphery of the narrative, occasionally
interjecting to violent effect. There's a conventional slasher movie
playing out here, but we're only treated to snatches of it through
Johnny's POV. The dialogue, which we mostly hear in the distance or off
screen, is purposefully inane and generic, which leads to much of the
film's deliciously black humour. We hear the youngsters come up with the
sort of ill-thought survival plans that we've seen backfire in dozens of
slasher movies, and it's hilarious when we see them go so badly wrong. Any
character development has already occurred off screen, and we often find
ourselves stumbling along with Johnny into the tail end of character arcs.
Think of David Lowery's A Ghost Story if the ghost liked to remove people's heads rather than simply
observing them.
Don't be fooled into thinking this is some pretentious exercise in genre
deconstruction that misses the point and forgets to entertain the
audience. This is as satisfying a slasher movie as you could hope for.
It's not a case of a filmmaker looking down on horror movies, ala
Haneke's Funny Games, but rather one who clearly loves the genre but is daring to strip it
down to its undies. Nash gambles on the theory that seeing stereotypical,
cardboard characters butchered in a succession of jaw-dropping ways is
enough to sate a slasher audience. And he's right.
But the thing is, you need to have talent to back this up, and Nash's
imagination runs wild here, delivering bloody set-pieces that will have
the most jaded gorehounds admitting "Well, that's something I've never
seen before." There's one particular kill that plays like something out of
a Tex Avery cartoon, with a human body manipulated in a way I've genuinely
never seen before.
Nash understands that there's something explicitly life-affirming about
witnessing fictional characters meet wildly violent demises. As we watch
characters have their insides ripped out we're made to think about how
brittle we really are, how the human body is a miraculous combination of
many things that can go wrong, and that at some point something inside us
will inevitably go wrong and that will be it for us.
He also understands that while horror fans love a good gory kill, they
also need a human to identify with. We eventually get that when the
victims are whittled down to the obligatory sole survivor, but nothing
makes this final girl stand out. Nash has purposely removed all the
defining traits of such an archetype, leaving us simply with someone who
wants to survive. And it's enough. The movie's final stretch is incredibly
tense because suddenly the focus has shifted from the hunter to the prey,
and we're in the shoes of the victim. In a nod to the climax of Fritz
Lang's M, we suddenly identify with someone we couldn't have cared less about
just a few minutes earlier because the film has now exposed their
vulnerability. Nash makes a mockery of the recent trend of misjudged
horror movies that mistakenly believe the genre has to play by the same
rules as conventional drama. Horror is the most primal of movie genres. It
boils down to two simple concepts: life and death, and when done well,
witnessing death can make you feel truly alive.
