Tag: ry-barrett

There’s quite a bit more here than meets the eye.

In A Violent Nature is not, as I had been told, a slasher movie told from the killer’s point of view.

Instead, writer-director Chris Nash dials up a multitude of perspectives, as if the doomed campers were being chased through a high-tech forest equipped with dozens of surveillance angles to choose from.

Stupid, soon-to-be-deceased college students rent a cabin in the woods. While hiking they disturb a memorial to Johnny, a mentally challenged boy who got bullied to death 70 years before.

Straight away we witness a now monstrous Johnny rise from the grave to seek revenge, and we spend considerable time riding shotgun alongside this unstoppable fiend as he makes an inspired mess out of the clueless kids.

Sometimes the murders are super gory, (the girl doing yoga gets some major stretching bodywork done) and some happen at a distance in the blink of an eye, as when a comely swimmer disappears below the waterline with a yelp from across the lake.

Nash keeps refreshing the views. He employs a static wilderness cam that dispassionately records long shots of the killer walking from one side of the frame to another. Next thing you know, we’re sitting on his shoulder, then a bird’s eye view, then a worm’s eye view.

With a string of cameras at his disposal, Nash asks us to consider the single-minded plight of a creative mutilator, in this case one that wears an old-time fireman’s mask, giving him the appearance of a predatory insect.

When Johnny occasionally pauses in his gruesome quest, we can get inside his horrible head and watch the wheels turn as he considers how best to maximize his menace, though he does remove his mask to play with a toy car at one point, a tragic reminder that this thing was once a happy child.

The undead death dealer featured in In A Violent Nature isn’t a killing machine, however. He wordlessly seems to enjoy the hunt and clearly takes pride in his victim-stalking and construction of murderous tableaux.

Johnny is obviously an artist, inviting us along to spy on his process. Now there’s a view you won’t see every day.