Review: In A Violent Nature

Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer

A clever remix of the slasher genre that imports aesthetics and traditions from video game storytelling.

This one’s not for everybody, and that’s okay. Told mostly from the perspective of the killer, this movie is mostly quiet and contemplative, with bursts of gore that range from strangely hilarious to the downright bone-chilling.

You catch bits and pieces of story and lore in overheard conversations and glimpses of museum exhibits, all details that reminded me of games like FIREWATCH, or the now-defunct FRIDAY THE 13th game, of course. The “walking” scenes—which aren’t even that much of the movie—lend the proceedings a meditative air that brought me back to SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS.

I admired the filmmaker’s impulses to turn classic slasher beats on their heads: endless expository scenes about the killer’s supernatural origin— as well as the ritual to dispose of him—are overhead briefly, while the ending ending asks, “I wonder what happened in the twenty minutes after Sally escaped Leatherface?” Good stuff.

The gore is impressively rendered and compares favorably to the many other gross-out slashers that have made their bones in recent memory: TERRIFIER, HATCHET, HOSTEL, SAW.