Deep in the woods, a group of young adult friends are camping for the weekend.  While on a hike to an old fire tower, Troy (Liam Leone) finds a locket hanging from the debris.  What he did not know at the time was that the locket was a grave marker of sorts for Johnny (Ry Barrett), a central figure to a violent and tragic local legend.  As so often is the case, the legend proves true and Johnny rises from the dirt and the peat moss to find his stolen locket, killing anyone or anything that stands in his way. 

Chris Nash debuted In a Violent Nature at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the Midnight category to great acclaim.  It was distributed in a joint effort between IFC Films and Shudder in the spring before making its bow on the horror streamer just in time for the leaves to change for fall and a chill begins to flavor the air.  With a more robust resume in the special effects department, this marks Nash’s first feature film as a writer and director, but as an acolyte to the guts and gore genre, he fills every frame with simply executed, gruesome dread. 

One of the striking things about the film is how it is shot with Pierce Derks behind the lens and Alex Jacobs providing a steady edit that does not often cut away from the carnage.  Nash teaches us how to watch the film pretty early on with long, silent takes following Johnny through the wilderness after his vengeance-fueled resurrection.  This choice opens the film up to the possibility of being captured as if it were a single take like how Sam Mendes opted to capture his World War I tale, 1917 (2019), but ultimately, Nash is not that formally ambitious. The result is a little bitter with long swathes of the film feeling like a video game as the camera stalks Johnny while he stalks his prey as if he were Arthur Morgan traversing the dusty, American West in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. 

The film finally kicks into gear once Johnny is in the vicinity of the campers.  Not only do we finally get to begin releasing that tension, but in the spirit of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Nash delivers some creative kills that thrive on the shock value of it all.  Both of those stalwarts have much more fleshed-out lore than Nature ultimately has, but Nash delivers violence in a way that would delight both Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven and in an atmosphere to match.  While his predecessors gave their monsters a little more concrete framework, Nash does not let Johnny be totally mindless, but he does not represent a metaphor for much of anything which does hold the film back a bit on a thematic level. 

Comparison being the thief of joy, it may not be a totally fair critique to levy, but given the title of the film, Nash brings it upon himself.  The gut-check reaction between the title and the setting is that Johnny is working to protect the forest and the wildlife – for that, check out Lee Haven Jones’ The Feast (2021), also on Shudder – but the actual tale, while tragic, is far less inspiring.  It is ultimately revealed that Johnny is the spirit of a developmentally delayed boy who was bribed by the local kids to climb the fire tower and collect a bag of toys only for one of the kids to jump out and scare him.  The bullies’ plan went off without a hitch, until Johnny fell from the tower to his death.  This leads the title to the interpretation that there is a “violent nature” in us all, though this interpretation is applied to the neighborhood kids and not Johnny, or even the present-day victims of the vengeful spirit, so even here it is a weak application.  This, then, leaves us one other party to which the title may apply; us, the audience.  As mentioned before, the film kicks into gear when Johnny begins his slaughter and it is us on the other side of the screen that cheer him along. 

Some of this is due to the absolutely infuriating dialogue that these characters are saddled with delivering and they all handle themselves with an immersion-breaking apprehension in front of the lens.  The result is that almost no connection between character and audiences is formed so we sit and wait for them to get picked off one by one, and more often than not find ourselves rooting for Johnny.  This would be fine, but the script does not support Johnny enough to be a classic anti-hero.  Since he is the only character in the film doing much of anything and because the film is structured and designed so that we see the film through his lens, we are naturally drawn to investing ourselves in him. 

As for the kills, Nash does get creative and nasty here, but he does not push the limits quite far enough.  One of the more iconic deaths comes in the early part of the film where Johnny uses a logging hook to take Aurora’s (Charlotte Creaghan) head and contort her body in such a way that she becomes knotted through a hole which he cut through her stomach.  It is gross but in a campy way that this brand of horror can so often be, especially because the victim is slain whilst doing her morning yoga routine at the top of a mountain.  Set against this backdrop, both visually and thematically, it is okay to laugh a little, and Nash seems to be constructing his kills in such a way that he is encouraging that behavior.   

Unfortunately, not all of the kills have this same winking humor about them and it presents as missed opportunity, especially given how some of the later kills are executed.  This is most clearly evident in Troy who is dispatched with a brutal yet uninventive rock to the head, when later the park ranger is ran through a log splitter (Reece Presley).  Given Troy’s bravado and bragging about how he is with all the ladies thanks to his physical endowment, there would have been that delicious thematic irony to see him meet his fate be being chopped up inch by inch.  By and large, it is never fair to judge a film on what it should have done by creating alternate scenarios, but this in not conjuing a new ending, rather just a simple rearranging of characters and plot on the page which would have greatly increased the rewatch value of this film. 

Even leaving something to be desired, In a Violent Nature is a nasty little film that serves as a handsome homage to those genre-defining, initial classics that so oven value concept over a larger, more intricate narrative.  In that same tradition, a sequel has already been greenlit, and Johnny will find himself slaying even more unwitting teenagers in his almost guaranteed pursuit of Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), the lone survivor of the camping trip.  Bookending the film with another long shot, this time we are not following, but holding on Kris as she listens to a woman (Lauren-Marie Taylor) recount a story about her brother being mauled by a bear in teh same woods.  We see the silent trees zipping past through the window just waiting to see a figure standing in the bushes.  Waiting for the truck to collide with something in the road.  Waiting for a hook to come crashing through the window.  Waiting… just waiting.