In the opening scene of “In A Violent Nature,” a group of weaselly-sounding men banter about a golden locket they’ve found attached to a branch protruding from the ground. It’s casual, boring chit-chat between pals who are likely living in a cabin together for the summer — at least, that’s the vibe. But we don’t see the men, and we don’t see the locket either. Director Chris Nash (feature debut) instead positions us to stare at a serene, albeit ominous, landscape: the evergreen rows of trees backgrounding a hole in a dingy, abandoned cottage. The camera stays still, holding onto the scenery as though it were focusing on a T-Rex. Finally, the men’s voices fade into the distant backdrop, and we dolly to that elusive branch, revealing that, indeed, they’ve taken the sacred piece of jewelry. Rookie mistake. For another agonizing moment of stillness, we stare at the branch. Then, in a slow eruption, a zombie (Ryan Barrett, “Lifechanger”) punches its way through the ground, emerging as a bloody and deformed bag of rotten flesh. His name is Johnny, and he has awakened to retrieve his stolen locket.
It becomes readily apparent that “In A Violent Nature” is not a conventional horror film — like its marketing campaign will have you believe — but rather a brave experiment. Nash is attempting to tell his slasher zombie-revenge flick in the style of slow cinema. While the film is a worthy stunt — the closest parallel to this film is the divisive “Skinamarink” — “Violent Nature” unfortunately demonstrates how incongruent slasher and slow cinema are.
Slow cinema relies on meditation. As a form of anti-cinema, it uses silence and visual poetry as drivers for its storytelling. The best films in the style —“Meek’s Cutoff” and “Memoria” — put the audience in a trance, possibly lulling them to sleep. Slow cinema is as close as a director gets to going “all in” with their film: Its mere existence and reputation eliminate 99% of the viewer base. Then, for the people willing to sit through silence, the question is whether these pauses in words and actions are actually impactful or merely wasting time. On the other hand, slasher horror relies on paranoia, usually centering around a killer on the loose. It is supposed to put the audience on edge, thrill and excite them and — in a good way — be immensely superficial. It’s hard to not be entertained by bloody murder, even if the film has 101 flaws. Unlike slow cinema films, slashers are primed for commercialism, with classics like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Halloween” leaning heavily into convention and camp.
The idea of a slow-burn slasher film is oxymoronic, and “Violent Nature” is exactly that: a hodgepodge of conflicting styles and visions. For a slow cinema film, there is a serious lack of content, both visually and thematically, to necessitate its pace — a zombie simply tries to kill people, nothing more, nothing less. For a slasher film, where’s the fun? When the campy violence abruptly ramps up, the film’s slow style demands seriousness and reflection rather than paranoia and anxiety. Nash’s subversion of well-known horror tropes — the couple who flirt and then die immediately after, the last hurrah from an injured fella, that one girl who always escapes — don’t even come across as ironic or playful in this context. Rather, they feel laborious — too deliberate and self-conscious to elicit any natural horror, thrill or humor. As a whole, Nash doesn’t justify why he went all in. The prolonged sequences of silence mostly waste time rather than build on any particular emotion or idea.
Beyond its stylistic choices, “Violent Nature” boasts a dry script, which all the actors struggle to deliver with any real tenacity. Sandwiched between the opening act and the hour-long killing spree are a few grueling stretches of exposition. The dialogue in the first stretch at a campfire is so direct and uninspiring that I can’t fault the actors for not infusing more oomph. Also, the unwitting victims get drunk and tell creepy stories while the camera pointlessly swirls around as though it were a Michael Bay (“Transformers”) film. It’s not disorienting in an interesting way, nor does it serve any discernible purpose. It just spins, on and on, in an effort to make a cringeworthy and purely functional scene even less pleasurable.
However, despite its many problems, “Violent Nature” has an invigorating ending. It’s a confusing, downright abstract moment about human nature and the need for possession that totally inverts the heavy-handedness of the campfire scene. For the last 15 minutes, Nash and his team remind us of their technical prowess and intelligence. As a finale that mostly occurs in simple shot-reverse-shot, there’s an eerie and sinister mood that is immediate and hard-hitting. The tension gnaws at the skin. It finally feels as though that gory hour, where the audience was lumbering limp-legged with Johnny and participating in his hunting ritual, was more than an exhibition on horror make-up and prosthetics. It feels like Nash was setting us up for a gripping finale, but the thrill misses the train, even though it arrived at the station. It happens far, far too late.
Clearly, a lot of work was put into the film. The audacity to conceive and follow through on this thought experiment is almost enough to make up for its major pitfalls. Unfortunately, “Violent Nature” is a slasher film and a slow cinema one, and Nash doesn’t really succeed at mixing oil and water, or making his mixture either friable or drinkable. Instead of being of a violent or thoughtful nature, the film is of an awkward one.
Daily Arts Writer Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
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