In a Violent Nature

Although obviously and intentionally indebted to the Friday the 13th films, writer-director Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature isn't content to mindlessly appropriate that series' premise of horny teenagers gathering at a rundown summer camp to be slaughtered. Nash's reconfiguration is much more granular than that, preferring to tune itself (almost completely) into the stoned, somnambulant rhythms present in the earlier, more ramshackle episodes while transforming the monster - in this instance Ry Barrett's hulking Johnny - into an adored, centre-frame subject. There's actually precedence for this kind of reversed perspective in Paramount's slasher serial. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives briefly toys with the idea of the peeping tom-style observation inherent to the Jason character being turned back against the creeper. In Tom McLoughlin's '86 slasher, the machete-wielding killer is caught in his equivalent of a private moment, mindlessly hacking away at some long dead victim. Nash's film goes far further than this brief, metatextual gag though. In a Violent Nature is consumed with its killer, the camera dutifully trailing in his wake as Johnny crashes through undergrowth, in search of a totemic locket. Outside viewpoints and performances are, for a majority of the film, pointedly irrelevant then. The anonymous victims who invade Johnny's space are contextualised using his point of view: they are therefore flat and one-note, nothing more than badly essayed irritants who demand to be silenced in increasingly ingenious ways. The time and energy usually apportioned to a more human frame of reference has been drained away here, leaving only the strange tranquillity of an untiring monster methodically battering through the woods, that used to be his prison, in search of something to silence the buzzing inside his skull.