Spoilers follow for In a violent naturein theaters now.
A great murder scene in a slasher film inspires more than shock, terror, or disgust. It makes you soar on the pure audacity violence. Gasps become grimaces. The grimaces burst out laughing. Applause greets the electric current of stunned disbelief running through the audience. Whether it’s the borderline comical killings of Jason Voorhees or the proudly obscene rampages of Art the Clown, what midnight moviegoers are applauding is the desire of a filmmaker to Go over there — to push the boundaries of good taste and dark humor, and take us overboard with them.
There is a victim of this caliber hiding halfway In a violent nature, an arty and unconventional new addition to the canon of thrillers about masked maniacs trudging through the woods in search of nubile coeds to dismember. The scene in question is already notorious, its reputation preceding Nature‘s hits theaters this week. HAS recent late night screening in Chicago, people reacted like theme park guests on a roller coaster. Someone may have even vomited, although that could also be apocryphal; I was there and I didn’t hear any retching over all the empathetic moans and emphatic cheers.
The scene arrives after about 40 minutes of almost meditative wandering in the woods, interrupted by occasional bursts of carnage, although the film has saved its most inventive and anatomically extreme mayhem for the upcoming centerpiece. (Squeamishers and spoilerphobes alike should take this as a warning to click away now.) Having just dispatched a vacationer swimming – a death we witness from a great distance, without any titillation – the film’s hulking, silent killer stumbles upon her blonde lover (Charlotte Creaghan) doing yoga in a clearing. Cornered, the young woman screams and steps back but finds herself facing a steep cliff. Given what happens next, she would have been better off taking her chances by going a long way down the embankment.
A quick, inhumane punch sends the killer’s hand – and the chained hook he wields – straight through the woman’s torso. In shock, she slowly turns towards her masked murderer, who then removes the hook and quickly plunges it into the top of her head. Is this depraved show over? No, this continues unabated, as the killer then turns his victim so that she is facing the water again and pulls on the chain that still dangles in his abdomen – a grotesque indignity that horribly snaps his neck and him pulls his head down and forward, then (cue barf bags) through that same bloody, gaping hole where his stomach should be. He effectively perverted her exercise routine, stretching her into a nightmarish and deadly yoga pose.
As far as slasher deaths go, this is a record. Was the film an official entry into the Friday 13 series, rather than a curious, methodical homage-poem in the same tone, this innovative and wicked murder would instantly land near the top of a Voorhees-kill-count power ranking, challenging the position of Kevin Bacon’s date with a arrow or that time Jason doused someone’s head in liquid nitrogen. It is THE Horror fans of this moment will likely spend the year enthusiastically remembering the single scene on which the film’s reputation as a must-see for gorehounds rests (although there is a later sequence involving paralysis and a wood-cutting machine which is arguably even gnarlier).
But the scene also confirms the genre of film In a violent nature It’s true. Until the big boy demonstrates some devilish creativity with his makeshift weapons, it’s questionable whether director Chris Nash is using the basic conventions of his borrowed genre to go somewhere new. The trick of the film is that it takes place primarily from the killer’s point of view – a complete extension of how the Friday 13 And Halloween the films sometimes briefly adopt the first-person POV of Jason and Michael Myers. Here the identification ratio has been reversed, so that we mainly follow the monster and are only briefly put in the shoes of its prey. This change in point of view blurs the language of the typical slasher film: because the killer is essentially a mute animal (unlike the deranged protagonist of the grimy ’80s slasher). Maniacal and its remake), staying close to him gives rise to long, wordless and plotless hiking scenes. The result is closer in style and rhythm to the dirges of Gus Van Sant’s slow and lugubrious cinema, such as Elephant Or Gerry.
But there’s nothing so philosophical about this film. This macabre scene of the Jason-style stalker twisting someone into itself like a knotted cherry stalk reveals the game. It abandons the pretense of abstract violence (like an earlier scene that cuts away just before the bully bloodies his mittens) and delivers the bloody products. In the heart, In a violent nature is not an art film playing on horror tropes but something like the opposite: a merciless old-school slasher that simply takes a circuitous and rather stagey route to the usual thrills. Nash subverts the form of the slasher film but not the content. Plot-wise, there are no major twists and turns.
The mood stretches, the following shots holding and holding the killer as he wanders into the wilderness in search of his next murder – these eccentric games over time are like a hockey mask pulled over the mind of “can you outdo” 80s slasher cinema. Most of the time, they delay the familiar dopamine hit of the genre-buff of limb-slicing action. To the extent that Nash has deconstructed the slasher, it’s to discover what you can remove from its formula while still remaining true to its violent nature. Are real characters necessary? Dialogue? A story? How quiet will the audience stand if you continue to provide the rationale for murder and mayhem?
Yet for everything Nash gets out of it, he adds a lot in the craft department. In a violent nature is proof that simply playing with convention can have exciting results. At the very least, slasher cinema would benefit from the attention to framing and pacing that the director applies to his stripped-down conceit; no real Friday 13 the film has never been so well shot or attentive to mood. Drawing inspiration from the arthouse, Nash refines or at least eccentrically differentiates his grind-house material.
And that also goes for his already historic Grand Guignol killing with a view. Another, um, hook What characterizes the barbaric encounter is the way it deliberately unfolds before us – the way Nash lingers on details, like the splintering of the cervical spine, or the breathtaking wide shot that he deploys to emphasize the altitude which condemns the yogi, the long fall which is his only alternative. to a brutal evisceration. More than the extreme absurdity of the murder, it is Nash’s elegant sequencing of images and his commitment to prolonging the psychic void state of violence that pushes this rendezvous with death into the slasher pantheon. A little patience can make a big difference, even in the ongoing arms race with painstakingly gruesome murder scenes.