In the Flesh: In a Violent Nature

In a Violent Nature opens with a decent oner as the undead mass murderer Johnny (Ry Barrett) claws his way out of the grave and trudges through the forest to recover his dead mother’s necklace from the thoughtless, ornery hick who stole it in passing. In case we couldn’t follow this Byzantine plot, we get a little snippet of Johnny’s memory of his mother talking to him in Hallmark Card about how the necklace means he’s her special boy. That we’re rehashing Friday the 13th, or rather the subsequent entries in the franchise, goes without saying, but why director Chris Nash is doing so remains an open question. The film’s gimmick is that, more or less, we’re following Johnny instead of the characters, but what is there to know about Johnny? What do we observe him doing that provokes any feeling or introspection? He trudges from place to place. He kills people whenever he comes across them. I suppose there’s the scene where he plays innocently with a toy car, but as far as characterization or genre commentary goes that’s a long way from a raison d’ etre. 

No, what Nash seems keen to pull back the curtain on is that a supernatural slasher’s job consists mostly of walking in straight lines through pleasant locales. A pond. A meadow. A forest. We spend so much time staring at the back of Johnny’s decaying head as he lumbers along that the first time the tone abruptly doubles back on itself for one of his Looney Tunes-style kills it does come as a bit of a shock, but by the second such scene all that’s left is a feeling of deepening tedium. The practical effects aren’t bad. Johnny’s antique fire helmet is pretty alien and unsettling. Aside from that, what Nash has to say and show to us feels almost bafflingly rote and thin. The trick of the perspective switch changes almost nothing about the nature of the supernatural slasher flick as a subgenre, and when he does follow the beats in their traditional mold it gets even worse. The film’s dialogue is forced, its actors poor to middling. Attractive twenty-somethings snap buzzwords at each other while darker subject matter hovers just offscreen, invoked but never dealt with.

The edifice of the slasher is faithfully recreated, but subversion requires insight, and there isn’t any to be found in In a Violent Nature. Nor is there any apparent interest in the genre it purports to subvert. There’s just nothing here, aside from an effectively slow and mechanical sequence in which Johnny dismembers a ranger (Reece Presley) using a log splitter. Lauren-Marie Taylor, playing the nameless woman who rescues sole survivor Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), does her level best to drag some meaning out of her monologue, but it’s overwrought and overlong, and if there’s some simple tension in the final scene as she stops the car to treat Kris’s injured leg, it isn’t worth the long, tedious journey through the woods it took us to get there.