It’s gore vs. bore in a ‘Nature’ movie all about splatter matter
“In a Violent Nature” — ½ star
I am guessing that when Chris Nash’s “In a Violent Nature” goes to streaming on Shudder, its target audience might jump straight to the 42-minute mark, the movie’s ultra-graphic piece-de-resistance, aptly described in this blurb from a parents-advisory website:
“A woman is stabbed through the back with a metal hook that is then jabbed into her skull and the chain is pulled, causing her neck to break before her head and spine are pulled backward through the hole in her stomach.”
An appreciative audience hooted approval and applauded this grisly spectacle at the Chicago Critics Film Festival earlier this month. (I will explain why that’s a good thing in a moment.)
Before this showcase scene, we sit through a few “Friday the 13th”-grade killings and many l-o-n-g, l-o-n-g tracking shots following a dead, plodding maniacal killer named Johnny (a mostly unseen Ry Barrett).
His corpse becomes honked off when somebody removes a locket from a collapsed fire tower in the woods. He goes on a slow, murderous walk in the woods, dispatching screaming people with tools, kitchen utensils, machinery and a big rock.
That’s it.
No suspense.
No rising or falling tension.
No character development.
No plot.
No twists or surprises.
Nothing truly new to see here, except the camera follows the killer around instead of his shrieking victims. (This does not constitute a killer’s point-of-view film as reported. “Halloween” best used that device, one co-opted by almost every 1980s slasher film knockoff.)
Once the gory shocks wear off — as they do quickly — “In a Violent Nature” becomes unexpectedly tiresome, even tedious. The pretentious, non-ending combines the genre cliché of the last-female-standing with a final sequence inspired by Michael Haneke’s 1997 thriller “Funny Games.”
Haneke’s final shot — utterly terrifying.
Nash’s? Wah-wahhhh.
Newer viewers to this genre (who haven’t seen the graphic works of Dario Argento, George Romero, Lucio Fulci, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Mario Bava and Wes Craven — at least his original cut of “Last House on the Left”) might be sufficiently shocked or shaken by the superficial one-note brutality here.
Just as those festival viewers were.
And that bodes well for our society.
Because nobody finds movies about dismemberment and graphic carnage entertaining or shocking while in a war zone or a disaster area where visual effects can’t possibly match the raw horrors of the real thing.
Even so, the visceral realism of “In a Violent Nature” lacks the thin cushion of make-believe that enables us to vicariously process and enjoy most horror tales.
This one borders on a classic “snuff” movie where its raison d'être is to show people being realistically and heinously killed for our amusement.
The 1995 thriller “Mute Witness” — about a woman who accidentally observes a snuff film being made — radiates the sheer fear and tension that eludes Nash’s clinical monstrosity.
But hey, Pierce Derks’ striking camerawork looks downright pretty.
That’s worth a generous half-star for sure.
• • •
Starring: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley
Directed by: Chris Nash
Other: An IFC Films theatrical release. Not rated by the MPAA, but contains graphic violence and gushers of gore. 94 minutes