Horror is my favorite genre. I saw TERRIFIER 2 twice in theaters. When I first saw the trailer for this film with its evocative title, I had high hopes for it... but also suspected that it could be pretty boring. The trailer itself is pretty boring. A slasher film that stays in the perspective of a lumbering monster has never been done before, so perhaps it could make audiences feel dread in a whole new way. I praise the idea of the experiment, but I also think it failed to set proper controls. Either way, the end result is incredibly boring.
What the trailer suggests is real-time mayhem. It even hints at the possibility of a single take. The movie isn't really either of those things, and this is the most significant reason why the experiment fails. From the very beginning, there are artificial cuts; we don't just follow the killer as he walks up upon his first victim--rather, there's some editing that advances the pace along. What would be a 90-second walk down a driveway instead becomes a 75-second walk because of a couple of quick time elapsing cuts. Why bother? A 90-second take could be tedious, but it would also be immersive. A 75-second edit can only be tedious since your eyes and imagination are literally jarred out of being placed in the scene. The whole film is like this: writer/director Chris Nash wants us to feel immersed in the killer's movements but isn't daring enough with his editing to do full immersion. There's a reason why films like JEANNE DIELMAN (201 min.) and AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (234 min.) with their long, static, unedited shots feel "shorter" than this movie (94 min.): they commit to fully placing us in the unblinking perspectives of their characters. Our gaze fixates, our pupils expand, and our attention holds and absorbs with long takes, whereas edits inevitably lead to "saccades"--our eyes jolt to the change and our attention span reloads to take in the new sight. (Don't believe me? Search for "Motion Pictures and Saccade Patterns," an excellent video about audience eye movements during THERE WILL BE BLOOD.) In short, the very editing that was presumably done to make the scenes briefer and less tedious probably only served to make them more uninteresting, not less.
On top of that, most of the killings aren't even done in a single take. Some of them are, and those are the most effective scenes of horror in the film, but many of the slashings are hindered by jump cuts, deliberately obscured blocking, and off-camera action that only call attention to the film's limited special effects budget. A real-time, unflinching depiction of a murder is a terribly unsettling thing--see IRREVERSIBLE, DANCER IN THE DARK, and DEKALOG: FIVE for some particularly disturbing examples. A movie that just edits together different angles of a murder is simply standard slasher fare and not especially capable of terrifying. That's how most of this movie is, which is another reason why it's a failed experiment.
If Nash had made this movie without all the unnecessary editing, it would have been a more successful experiment but it could've possibly been just as boring of a failure. Most of the acting is quite bad (in part because of the bad writing, which could have been avoided through some more naturalistic improvisation), the backstory is confusing and cliche, and there's nothing on display here that stands out as any indication of excellence--but at least we'd have a more accurate depiction of what appears to be promised by the trailer. I can't recommend this film to anyone--not even horror aficionados--who are likely to feel that their time has been wasted. At one point in the middle of the film, my husband went to the bathroom. When he returned, I filled him in on what he'd missed with a whisper: "He did some walking." We laughed in our shared misery. Perhaps it's possible to make an effective horror movie in this style, but IN A VIOLENT NATURE is certainly not it.
What the trailer suggests is real-time mayhem. It even hints at the possibility of a single take. The movie isn't really either of those things, and this is the most significant reason why the experiment fails. From the very beginning, there are artificial cuts; we don't just follow the killer as he walks up upon his first victim--rather, there's some editing that advances the pace along. What would be a 90-second walk down a driveway instead becomes a 75-second walk because of a couple of quick time elapsing cuts. Why bother? A 90-second take could be tedious, but it would also be immersive. A 75-second edit can only be tedious since your eyes and imagination are literally jarred out of being placed in the scene. The whole film is like this: writer/director Chris Nash wants us to feel immersed in the killer's movements but isn't daring enough with his editing to do full immersion. There's a reason why films like JEANNE DIELMAN (201 min.) and AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL (234 min.) with their long, static, unedited shots feel "shorter" than this movie (94 min.): they commit to fully placing us in the unblinking perspectives of their characters. Our gaze fixates, our pupils expand, and our attention holds and absorbs with long takes, whereas edits inevitably lead to "saccades"--our eyes jolt to the change and our attention span reloads to take in the new sight. (Don't believe me? Search for "Motion Pictures and Saccade Patterns," an excellent video about audience eye movements during THERE WILL BE BLOOD.) In short, the very editing that was presumably done to make the scenes briefer and less tedious probably only served to make them more uninteresting, not less.
On top of that, most of the killings aren't even done in a single take. Some of them are, and those are the most effective scenes of horror in the film, but many of the slashings are hindered by jump cuts, deliberately obscured blocking, and off-camera action that only call attention to the film's limited special effects budget. A real-time, unflinching depiction of a murder is a terribly unsettling thing--see IRREVERSIBLE, DANCER IN THE DARK, and DEKALOG: FIVE for some particularly disturbing examples. A movie that just edits together different angles of a murder is simply standard slasher fare and not especially capable of terrifying. That's how most of this movie is, which is another reason why it's a failed experiment.
If Nash had made this movie without all the unnecessary editing, it would have been a more successful experiment but it could've possibly been just as boring of a failure. Most of the acting is quite bad (in part because of the bad writing, which could have been avoided through some more naturalistic improvisation), the backstory is confusing and cliche, and there's nothing on display here that stands out as any indication of excellence--but at least we'd have a more accurate depiction of what appears to be promised by the trailer. I can't recommend this film to anyone--not even horror aficionados--who are likely to feel that their time has been wasted. At one point in the middle of the film, my husband went to the bathroom. When he returned, I filled him in on what he'd missed with a whisper: "He did some walking." We laughed in our shared misery. Perhaps it's possible to make an effective horror movie in this style, but IN A VIOLENT NATURE is certainly not it.
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