My Day with “In A Violent Nature”

This morning, after adding sugar and cream to a hot cup of coffee, I left the spoon in the cup, and then reached over it to put the sugar back, tipped the cup, overcorrected, and smacked it the other way, sending a large wave of sugar coffee over an open drawer of spoons and forks and other miscellaneous utensils. Then I sat down and decided to figure out how to spell the word missallyanus. And that, my friends, is why In a Violent Nature.

Good Morning Sunshine

Evil awakens! Can you sit through a 4 minute sequence of an out of focus dude climbing out of the dirt in the middle of a forest, and then an additional many minutes long sequence of him lumbering through Redneck backwoods while two dudes argue in circles off in the distance? Can you sit through a guy chasing another guy into the forest, the latter of whom gets himself caught in a bear trap, and is then subsequently murdered off screen?

Great! Then you shall be later rewarded with a very, very gruesome and… frankly… overindulgent scene of said lumbering dude punching a hole in the gut of a girl whose only crime was doing yoga.

I may be biased because my TV’s sound system sucks so I have to watch everything with subtitles, but I enjoyed that the regular teens in a cabin horror played out in bits and pieces. The voyeuristic perspective captures the main beats of a story that’s been done and done again. Some people, especially those who aren’t paying all of their attention to this film, may dislike this fresh take on the slasher genre.

Good Afternoon, Sergeant Major

There’s power in the empty spaces of a film. My darling Skinamarink played this card over and over again, and boy oh boy did that feel like it was overdone– and I even liked that movie! It’s a thing in In a Violent Nature, too, where you’re supposed to ignore the usual ‘focus’, and instead try to piece together the story in the background, filling the emptiness with your own thoughts and emotions. In theory, this method should keep your mind engaged and searching for an answer.

Funny enough, the most effective use of this emptiness and the dread that it invokes comes at the end of the film, when the final girl stares off into the woods. We begin to think that maybe the killer is still there, still watching, just out of frame.

Those are her fears. That’s the final girl, terrified that as she stares into the trees, something unseen is staring back. But that final shot only works if the rest of the movie worked up towards this. You just needed the patience to get through it. Just like my day.

Good Evening, Darling

Returning to my point about the story unfolding in the background, at around halfway into the movie (if you’re dumb) and early on (if you’re not dumb), you get the sense that our voiceless, mindless killing monster may actually be doing things on purpose. His first kill was a poetic one, killing the guy who’s hunting illegally after he’s trapped, and then returning to the house to pick up a small golden pendant on a chain.

Later, the movie (for the really dumb ones) spells it out. The murderer is looking for a specific golden pendant on a chain, and has been searching for it the whole time, having been awoken when one of the teens snagged it from its resting place. So for the murderer to fuck off, they need to simply give it back. A park ranger with history with the murderer figures out what he wants, but the ranger claims that giving it back won’t make the murderer go away.

I draw issue with two points of this film. The first is that as the title implies, and the opening scene reinforces, there was a case to be made that this murderer was meant to be an analogy for nature and how it’s being disregarded and disrespected by the people who visit it. This doesn’t really pan out in any way. My second issue was the transition from the murderer’s first kill and when he chooses to pursue the kids in the cabin. He notices them first as they drive by on a road, but other than, maybe, curiosity, there’s no reason for him to pursue them. 

This thought has been bothering me since the moment it happened, but why not continue with the theme of nature fighting back, and give us a tiny, single soundbite of the kids throwing a can out of the car as they drive by. This would give him the motivation to follow them, and underline why he wanted to kill them. Littering.

I mean In a Violent Nature is fine. There’s a few good kills, a few lazy ones, and a lot of the empty space. It’s just a self-indulgent film that should be ticked off your watchlist, and as such, I rate it

YMMV

I watched In a Violent Nature on Hulu.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!