In A Violent Nature

In A Violent Nature isn't obfuscating much with its title. It's definitely so, and is centred on an antagonist who possesses one, and set within a thick forest that definitely counts. Each of those violent natures is brought about by human activity. It starts with acquisitiveness, an off-screen conversation while the camera sits on a ruined structure. A frame without a window, held hanging in the air without much of a wall around it. A framing device, in fact, one of many metacinematic elements of a horror that is bluntly, wetly, experimental.

Not necessarily successful, but nonetheless compelling, even hypnotic. At times its pace is less slow than implacable, the trudge of Johnny (variously, but most often Ry Barret) sometimes stepped between cuts, a change in lighting and density indicative of unseen progress. Johnny is in several senses slow, but he will get there. It will be a bloody passage too. Writer/director Chris Nash has done horror shorts before, also contributed to the second outpost of The ABCs Of Death series. He's also worked as a special effects supervisor for various films including gonzo Psycho Goreman, but this is a début feature. This isn't so much a film from the killer's perspective. Maniac and its remake have been over that ground before. It's an exercise in framing from that first shot, onwards. An unreliability of perspective, a deconstruction if not a decay of what has gone before.

Where it is weakest is when it deigns to explain. A flashback of sorts undercuts later stories. It's a memory made possible by editing, and I wonder what the parent shot looked like, a moment of not seeing a figure in the mirror they are and are not caught by. A different background image is assumed and then alluded to, an off-screen reaction to something off-screen creates more unease by implication than anything else. That miasma of dread drifts differently in the breeze than the wet mist of an axe's unceasing blows. We know something is going to happen because the camera is pointed there, but again and again In A Violent Nature subverts by having things that matter happen where the camera is not. We have a tale reduced to background, to environment, loitering on the fringe of the campfire and us never quite inside the circle. Orbiting around it, in the dark mass. Not alone.

That special effects background lends itself to some monstrous endings. Yoga that becomes a discovery of the inner self. A swimmer preyed upon by that which does not swim. A slow disassembly that is a part of a cycle of revenge. A staggering whose length is signposted by the fade of batteries, a slowed echo of times and tales past. I would hesitate to assign subgenre. Clear elements of slasher, splatter, and a fair supernatural element are present. The references are such that almost anyone would pick up why the vehicle that collects the survivor matters, but In A Violent Nature pushes that sequence further than you would expect, further than you would perhaps want it to go. When it stops it's not a kindness, no matter what comes next.

As with Longlegs I feel that excellent early tension-building is undercut if not overkilled by later certainties. A simple shot along and across a canyon to a cliff is much more powerful than the twisted knots of the preceding scene. A minimal approach isn't left alone and we revisit detail in dialogue. In the Halloween franchise Michael Myers is sometimes known as The Shape. While it's a term from the Salem witch trials it's also about a space occupied on screen. When outline becomes detail we're given keys that could have been left lost. The locked door is more mysterious than seeing what's behind it.

I don't want to single out any others of the small cast because even the act of doing so might constitute spoilers. Perhaps the only familiar face is Lauren Taylor who was in Friday The 13th Part Two. For all that we're 40 years on, 50 from the Texas Chain Saw Massacre as a genre creators are still chasing Jason. In an early scene we're given sight of a rusted trap, and as crude and old as those mechanisms are they still work. So does In A Violent Nature, except where it doesn't.

Johnny's goal is a simple one, and we are dragged along behind him. The geographic looping reminded me of the excellent Fish And Cat, which in similarly experimental bravura was shot in a single take. There each revisitation another bite at a central mystery, a new ingredient to the melange. Here we're given exposition in bloody chunks, sometimes in ways that are hard to swallow. Even a clumsy sandwich can satisfy and for genre fans this is one to watch and an indication of talent to follow.