In A Violent Nature (2024) – Follow Friday

Released: 1st August
Seen: 3rd August

2009 is the last year that we got a Friday the 13th film in theaters. This franchise dominated the 80s and created an icon of horror cinema but has been dormant for 15 years. 15 years without an entry in a franchise known for being cheap to make and an almost certain bet at the box office is insane. The only thing that we’ve had from this franchise in that time has been a couple of fan films and a video game in 2017. That video game was an asymmetrical game where one player got to be Jason while everyone else played counselors and that design choice left the people making the game with a bit of a dilemma. 

See, one of the things that’s fascinating about Friday the 13th and Jason as a character is that we never really see how he gets from one location to another but if you’re going to play him in a video game then it’s inevitable that you’ll need to work out how. In the video game, they accomplished this by giving Jason teleportation powers, a bit of a controversial choice but one borne of the necessity of making a game that people could play. So, what if you took the experience of being Jason and made an entire film about that? Well, that’s what In A Violent Nature takes on as a challenge, one that it mostly manages to accomplish.

In A Violent Nature begins in a forest in Ontario where a makeshift grave for a man named Johnny (Ry Barrett) is set up. This grave is actually the burnt-out remains of a fire tower and hanging from one of the burnt-out legs of that tower is a locket. When a couple of teenagers take that locket, they end up causing Johnny to rise from the grave (because the locket is what was keeping him down there… don’t ask, Slasher movie logic) and so begins Johnny’s revenge. For the next hour and a half we follow Johnny as he makes his way through the woods, a place he clearly knows better than anyone, stopping occasionally to enact a brutal violent murder on one of the random teenagers who happened to be around before doing even more slow walking around.

In A Violent Nature lives in this strange place where cheesy slasher and arthouse collide, creating a fascinating spin on a well-established genre. It knows the tropes of the genre and knows that its audience is aware of them too, it knows how you might expect the film to look and sound. It knows you expect a soundtrack, quick edits to hide a couple of gore effects, a series of short shots that last a few seconds and a ton of half-interesting dialogue delivered by the cheapest actors you could get… it just denies you all of those things because the central gimmick of this film is that it’s a cheesy slasher where you never leave the killer. You’re not going to get big character moments for the main cast of characters, you’re going to watch as our killer walks through the woods for 5 minutes. I know the idea of that sounds painful, like someone took the Gus Van Sant film Gerry and threw in a brutal mutilation every 20 minutes but in practice what we get is a fascinating deconstruction of the Slasher genre.

One of the things that makes Slashers fun is that a lot of it is built on surprise. The shock moment when a body is thrown through a window, the moments after we see someone get brutally killed and someone walks through the same area only to see nothing there and of course the legendary Final Girl Circuit (where the final girl runs through the location we’re on and keeps stumbling over the corpses of her friends, it’s a classic because it works every time). In A Violent Nature takes those moments and just shows how hard those are to set up, lengthy scenes of our killer dragging his victims around to get them where they need to be or just throwing a body somewhere to get it out of the way. There’s a dark comedy to it, it’s kind of what any viewer knew had to happen but there’s an undeniably funny element to just seeing this giant killer dragging his victims’ corpses away. This happens time and time again, scenes we’ve seen so many times before playing out from this new perspective create some genuinely hilarious and fascinating moments.

What it also does is something that’s almost impossible to do with these big silent killers, namely it lets Johnny have a personality. Sure, most of the film has him just walking in the dead centre of the frame with his back to the audience that’s following him but it breaks it up with genuine moments exploring his backstory and character. Seeing the weird hallucinations that Johnny sees about the locket that started everything makes you understand him, a moment where Johnny takes a break to play with a toy car almost makes him loveable. Most slashers just treat their killer as a big dumb guy who is there to do a whole lot of violence, and Johnny does a fair bit of that but in forcing us to follow him for as long as we do we end up actually getting to know him better than any other slasher villain. It’s fascinating seeing the killer getting a character moment like the toy car scene, I can’t think of another film that would even try something like that but it works so well.

Of course, In A Violent Nature does break up these moments of long walks and the like with some truly brutal kills that are the kind of thing you would dream of seeing in these classic slashers. Some of these kills are so brutal it’s genuinely amazing that they made it into the finished film, they truly go for the gusto with every single brutal kill that you see, possibly because they knew that this idea was so potentially polarising that they needed to have enough gore to keep the fans going. The effects work is spectacular, each kill feels shocking and intense. These kills are the only moments where the film will dare to break away from its usual visual aesthetic to embrace the editing and visual style of the classic slashers, but only for a few specific kills (there’s one in particular, one involving yoga, that horror fans are already talking about being one of the best kills in a horror film this year and I concur with that). Sure this is an arthouse film, but it’s also a brutally violent slasher film and they make damn sure you remember that.

Honestly the big problem with In A Violent Nature is when it breaks away from Johnny which it only does occasionally. It does it once when the kids are telling the backstory of what happened to Johnny and then right at the end of the film. Both times it’s jarring and feels wrong, although admittedly when they do it at the end it does give the scene a moment of tension when you realise you don’t know where Johnny has gone. Still, for a film with a central gimmick like “We never leave the killer’s POV” it feels like there had to be a way to avoid leaving his POV and have the same impact. Those two scenes are still fairly interesting, they maintain the general tone of the film in terms of the visuals and the editing but I just tend to prefer it when a film commits 100% to an idea and this one is only going for 95%, still fairly great but could’ve been improved.

In A Violent Nature is a wildly fascinating experiment, taking a well-known genre and revealing how the tricks are done just by forcing the camera to stay with the antagonist. It’s definitely not for everyone, you have to be prepared to watch a big lumbering guy walk around silently for minutes at a time but if you’re willing to meet the film on its own terms it makes for a fascinating spin on something that is mostly known for being silly and mindless. It’s like a gourmet chef trying to recreate a Big Mac, you know all the elements that go into that but the way it’s assembled makes it something to behold. Knowing that a sequel is planned does make me wonder how they can make this gimmick work twice, but even if they fail next time they definitely got something special this time.