Horrorfest 2025: In a Violent Nature

In a Violent Nature

Written and directed by Chris Nash

Starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone, Charlotte Creaghan, Lea Rose Sebastianis, Sam Roulston, Alexander Oliver and Lauren Taylor

Canada, 2024

IN A VIOLENT NATURE is a slasher flick with an interesting premise: what if a movie like FRIDAY THE 13th was told from the point of view of the killer instead of the victims? But, almost as soon as I thought, “Oh that’s cool,” I also thought, “Wait a minute. Don’t most slasher movies routinely tell at least part of the story literally from the killer’s point of view? Doesn’t HALLOWEEN start literally through the eyes of Michael Myers? Don’t we spend a lot of FRIDAY’s run time stalking through the forest from the killer’s perspective?”

The answer is yes. However, the idea that IN A VIOLENT NATURE is told from the slasher’s POV is only part of the idea. First of all, it’s not REALLY all just from the slasher’s POV. Secondly, the filmmakers use this limited POV to make a sort of inverted ZONE OF INTEREST for slashers, commenting on the absurdity of slasher movies and their sequels by allowing the annoying stuff like relationships between victims and plot exposition, to unfold incidentally on the sidelines so that we catch only snippets of it here and there as the killer does the nuts and bolts of slashing we never see like walking from one place to another and hide behind stuff and stage stuff for others to find.

This approach also does away with the pretense that we should care about this stuff. The killer doesn’t care about this stuff, why should we. Also, we see how and why he does everything he does, first hand, so while the premise is contrived, the actual movie is less contrived than others in the genre, rendering it somehow less cynical than some of the “classics” of the genre. It’s counter intuitive: you’d think focusing on the killer over the victims would be a nihilistic move, but it comes off as less performative, and therefore, less insulting and exploitative.

The movie is also full of a bunch of other stuff lacking in most slashers, like a slow pace, time to look at the beautiful scenery and nice cinematography. Still, I was surprised to find most of the online commentary is that the movie sucks, is boring, the acting is bad and there’s no point to it. So… watch at your own risk.

I guess I never got around to describing the plot, but if there was ever a movie that embodied Ebert’s notion a flick is not about WHAT it is about, but HOW it is about it, it’s this one. I wonder if he would have liked it? Probably not. But I did!