In a Violent Nature
Think Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Camp Crystal Lake.
Writer-director Chris Nash’s feature directorial debut, In a Violent Nature, opens in eerie serenity, with a gorgeously layered image of a forest seen through a deteriorated window frame. Birdsong and gentle breezes take aural precedence, though there are off-screen human voices of an evidently teen-to-twentysomething variety that clash discordantly with all the verdant beauty. The camera eventually tracks laterally, rack-focusing to reveal a locket hanging around a pipe. A hand enters frame, removing the bauble from its perch. Big mistake, as evidenced by the psychotic demon that soon emerges from the peaty earth below.
This is Johnny (Ry Barrett), a hulking, skin-mottled figure so obviously inspired by Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees that the hockey-masked undead spree killer could sue for residuals. But Nash and his crew aren’t out to brazenly imitate their forbear so much as affectionately and provocatively rework him and his murderous exploits. The quite ingenious conceit here is to filter slasher-flick tropes and story mechanics through an arthouse-cum-slow-cinema prism. Think Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Camp Crystal Lake.
In this strange universe, Johnny is the protagonist, the camera following him mostly from behind in steady medium profile as he stalks through the woods on an infernal fetch quest. That stolen locket is the goal, and the flora and fauna are his cheering squad. There isn’t any score of the breathlessly insistent kind that typified the Friday the 13th series. The trickle of running water or the crush of leaves underfoot is music enough. Even with a reanimated corpse as the focus, the lengthy strolls through the countryside prove very lulling and pleasing. It would hardly be surprising if David Attenborough popped in to narrate all the lush (in)action
Nash has other disruptions in mind, and ones more appropriate to the genre on which In a Violent Nature is riffing.