Have you ever wanted to see a man being fed into a log-splitting machine? Yes? Then In a Violent Nature is for you. No? There’s still something for you, if you enjoy (wrong word) well crafted films with an innovative approach to sound and a sharp eye for a visual.
Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre entirely from Leatherface’s point of view and that’s more or less what you have here. Except this monster makes Leatherface look like an articulate sophisticate he’s so lumpen, monomaniacal, unstoppable.
This update on the Golem is a killing machine who’s been buried underground for at least ten years, but now he’s been reactivated by a bunch of teenagers who have removed the thing that was keeping him safely buried – a locket belonging to the creature’s mother.
Having dug his way back to the surface, this semi-decayed human dressed in filthy, semi-composted clothes then goes on the rampage, if “rampage” is understood as something that can happen slowly. This beast plods, he trudges and he stomps but he never stops, and he kills anything human he happens to come across – kids out camping, two girls swimming, a park ranger, who’s the guy who ends up in the log splitter.
Chris Nash’s film tracks the mayhem from the monster’s point of view, his camera almost always right behind him. We barely get to see his face (it isn’t pretty), but we do get plenty of reaction shots from his various victims, none of whom really stands a chance.
The gore is spectacular but the clever thing about it is that it escalates, with Nash attempting with the next killing to top what’s come before. An early victim is killed fairly straightforwardly with a drawknife – head split in two. But by the time Nash gets to the young woman practising yoga out in the woods he has upped the ante and reveals a taste for dark humour with a death that would have been impossible if the victim weren’t so flexible.
The sound design is with the beast too. There is no musical score. The sound of the steady tramp, tramp, tramp of his footfall through the forest litter. The slurp of entrails as they leave the body. The crack of a limb being severed. Though Nash also keeps us up to speed on what the beast’s next victims are doing, so we often hear conversations by people who are really out of earshot.
Visually, Nash makes each death distinct. For example the guy whose head is popped like a water-filled balloon, he gets the static overheard treatment, so we can see exactly what’s going on.
Ry Barrett is never going to win an Oscar for his work as the lumbering thing but he does give us a creature with nuance. Johnny (he has a name) may be undead but he’s smart as well as skilled in killing. We regularly see him reacting to developments. This creature can think tactically.
It is in many ways a very familiar horror. There’s even a final girl, in the shape of Andrea Pavlovic, who wears a white shirt instead of the usual white T shirt. Nash has also finessed generic conventions with his canny camera and immersive sound. He claims to have been influenced by Terrence Malick (the glides through the forest are like The Thin Blue Line, I suppose) and Gus Van Sant in his Gerry, Elephant and Last Days period (the intense focus, I’m guessing) but this might be the sort of thing that film-makers say to interviewers because they have to say something. What I mean is: he’s doing fine on his own without having to invoke the names of others.
At another level, the idea that horror is always “about” something else can be given a rest this time out. He’s the repressed Freudian id. Or he’s post-industrial America on the loose. Much-abused Nature taking revenge. Spin it any way you like and it doesn’t make the film any better. This is a superbly conceived and brilliantly delivered horror movie. Horrifying and horrible – in its original sense. Give the special effects team a cigar.
In a Violent Nature – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
