Lonesome Dell: 'In A Violent Nature'
The many flaws and fragile promise of the latest horror "game-changer"
Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is one of the defining horror films of the past 25 years. Many things make it as good as it is, most of them so deeply embedded and interwoven into the text, and so symbolic in nature that they’re difficult to discuss or even point to from frame to frame. But one big, simple reason why Halloween II is so good is the frames themselves. The images. The texture of their surfaces, darkness falling over cornfields like a cloud of spores, the russet, desiccated ringlets of Scout Taylor-Compton’s unwashed hair, the grainy digital capture of news and surveillance footage distorted by extreme, convex close-ups.
The images I associate most immediately with Halloween II are of Michael Myers’s progress on foot toward Haddonfield. Captured from above in roving drone shots, he marches over tilled fields, swamp, dirt, grass, pavement. He follows the ghost of his mother into a farmhouse, kills a cruel group of townies, and stares at a pulpy billboard warning people about him. Interspersed between these scenes (and the Michael scenes themselves are all interstitial) are several plaintive, painterly, and lonesome shots of him walking. The Michael Myers of the preceding, non RZ Halloween films made his silent, enigmatic, endless advance a cornerstone of his character profile. It’s a large part of what makes the character so scary, a more poetic evocation of his invincibility and bloodlust than the actual violence he inflicts or his invulnerability to blow after fatal blow. It adds a windswept sleekness to his hulking heft. This is what I hated about the first two David Gordon Green Halloweens — Michael was a ten-ton lump of muscle — fearsome because of his brute strength and aggression. RZ restored a critical integer in Michael’s fear factor that John Carpenter and Debra Hill understood intimately — the slight supernatural touch that sets Michael apart from the rest of the world. Never overplayed, however. This evanescent touch distinguishes the force of pure carnage as something he incarnates, not something he embodies. Or at least not something he embodies exclusively.
If the killer in My Bloody Valentine or many of the Friday the 13th films were borne out of Michael’s brute strength and the creature from It Follows was borne of his endless advance, then the entity in In A Violent Nature finally propagates the delicate otherworldliness that gave the original Michael Myers his distinct appeal. It is a film that could be said to be 90+ minutes of endless advance, but like Halloween II’s Michael, and unlike the creature in It Follows, the entity in In A Violent Nature (whose name is I guess Johnny? lol) isn’t mindlessly driven. He stops, ambles, looks around, plots, rests. Considers some of his kills before he commits them and often chooses the least direct means of doing so. Considers things apart from destruction at all. What defines him isn’t his brute strength (that’s the means) or endless advance (that’s the ends), but the touch of cosmic elegance to his movements, which are largely but not exclusively evoked by his silent progress through the film’s natural landscapes.
I liked In A Violent Nature. I couldn’t help myself. There’s so much not to like. It’s a remarkably insecurely made film, though many critics and viewers have come away with the opposite impression. I think that because its tone, pace, perspective, and sound design are distinct enough from what’s popular right now they’ve been taken as a package to be ironed out and unassailable, the emblems of a master’s confident rejection of prevailing trends.
In every other way In A Violent Nature is right in line with convention and in fact chases the type of trends that studios build into quotas to be wielded like cattle drivers at pitch meetings. But the ways that it is different are significant enough to note. Even if they’re only different from the film’s immediate genre peers and find direct referents in older, better films like Halloween 2, Sombre, Angst, Vengeance Is Mine, Suzhou River, even Night of the Hunter and The Lodger. But what makes In A Violent Nature “different” is also only one reason to like it. Or why I think it’s worth deeper consideration.
First, I do want to talk about all of the things that are bad about this movie, because I can imagine if I was in a different mood while watching I could easily have come away thinking it was a complete mess. I’ve read several reviews and have had conversations with people who came away with this feeling, and I really do see it. The major mark against the film is director Chris Nash’s insecure handling of his conceit and the various visual strategies employed to explicate this conceit — that the spirit of a dead boy has become flesh in the form of a roided-out lumberjack and will kill anyone he sees en route to reclaiming a locket that belonged to his mother. The main thing that has led to In A Violent Nature being picked out as “different” from the rest is the near-subjective POV perspective Nash and cinematographer Pierce Derks employ for a good deal of the film’s runtime. But there’s a bit of slippage here that I think Nash gets lost in.
There is the visual device of following closely behind the entity (I’m not calling him Johnny), which is merely the most evocative illustration, or explication of the film’s conceit, that of the endless pursuit of the locket. You could call them the gimmick (POV shots) and the conceit (the entity’s pursuit of the locket). The gimmick proceeds from the conceit, not the other way around. But because of the boldness of the gimmick’s pictographic qualities (again, largely as a consequence of context — the number of widely-released and publicized horror movies that attempt anything against the grain is dispiritingly low), it overwhelms the conceit, and according to my reading of many readings of the film, becomes confused in the eyes of the viewer for the conceit itself. Put more simply, the POV shots are so arresting they are taken to be “the point” of the film, not the entity’s pursuit of the locket, or the incarnation of an unstoppable violent force, or the uncanny juxtaposition of a fragile and sensitive boy’s soul trapped within the confines of a giant killer, etc. I can’t blame people for this misreading and don’t know if I can even call it a misreading when the film’s marketing repeatedly held up positive critical reactions to the POV shots as selling points for the film throughout its publicity rollout.
What happens, I think, is that viewers become confused and upset when the near-subjective POV shots break and Nash gives us scenes depicting the entity’s various marks along the road. These scenes employ a perspective that usually starts out as, I suppose you could call them limited third person, or directed first person — the entity is looking on at a group of people without them seeing him, giving him, and thus the audience, access to their conversation and activities. But the camera follows them inside of buildings and jumps from great distances to close in on them, picking up intimate conversations the entity couldn’t possibly overhear and affording us close-ups on details he couldn’t possibly see from his vantage point. I don’t think the mere fact that Nash breaks from the near-subjective POV shots which start the film off on a strong note is a mark against the film. This is a film that was picked up by Shudder. I did not expect it to be like, The Plains or Wavelength or something. Employing a mix of perspectives, visual motifs, and shooting strategies is perfectly in line with the film’s narrative and even aesthetic aims. I felt that the film meant to evoke the forest that the entity roams through too, not just the entity, in much the same way that Zombie evokes the land outlying Haddonfield, the soil that Michael Myers sprang from, not just Michael himself.
The problem is that Nash’s execution of various visual strategies, the consistency he holds to while employing each strategy, and the method by which he cuts between them are often very silly, stupid, and badly done. Take one particularly offensive scene early on in which the entity approaches his first crop of victims. The camera unsuctions from his back to face him from far away, with the group around a campfire in between. We’ve already gotten a needlessly over-elaborated opening scene in which the locket at the heart of his quest is removed from a felled fire tower, releasing its hold on the land, and allowing him to rise. There is a decently graceful bit of visual poetry in that scene that was waterlogged by unnecessary dialogue explaining what you’re already seeing, which requires no explanation. Nash again succumbs to the temptation of over-elaboration during the campfire, when the characters again happen to explain the lore behind the entity at the exact moment he’s stalked up to their campground.
As in Skinamarink, In A Violent Nature draws some of its power from refusal. Holding to such a limited perspective elides the rest of the world, focusing our attention only on the entity’s immediate surroundings and tuning us to his visual and sonic frequency. It’s hypnotic, like staring into a Rothko painting or fixing your ears to a single ambient sound in an otherwise quiet room, like a dripping tap or buzzing fly. Your vision fixes on its point and fails elsewhere, as does your hearing. When there is a break — as in the under-the-bed jumpscare in Skinamarink — the effect on the audience is going to be a violent jolt even if it isn’t a shot intended to scare. Simply being uncoupled from a dominant visual strategy shakes the viewer out of their stupor. The first time Nash chooses to do this it’s to focus our attention on a poorly written conversation over-explaining what we already know. The disappointment melted into comedy for me when I then spotted the entity awkwardly lurching in the background, eavesdropping on a bunch of kids hyping up his lore.
Nash has tapped into several cinematic strategies that generate significant quantities of power when properly utilized. And he demonstrates some understanding of how to utilize them. But he so often undercuts his own momentum by cutting in the wrong place, to the wrong thing, for the wrong amount of time. By mistrusting his own intuition that the audience is with him, will follow the entity where he goes without any nagging questions arising. What shucks people out of immersion, ironically, are Nash’s attempts to keep them immersed.
Halloween II accomplishes in about thirty minutes what In A Violent Nature tries and usually fails for over 90 minutes to do. Michael’s advance toward Haddonfield is singularly focused yet diverting, menacing yet endowed with an enigmatic kind of melancholy due not just to recurring visions of his mother, but the weary lag of Michael’s gait. There is an aesthetic consistency to the images — devitalized colors, coruscating highlights and deeply sodden shadow — yet a dazzling, enthralling diversity of approaches to framing Michael — eclipsed in crossfade, center-framed and overtaking the shot, barely perceptible in the extreme recess of a high-angle wide shot with a staggering depth of field. When Zombie is at his worst his scattershot approach to lighting, framing, and cutting rend his films to discontinuous pieces. At his best, here and in Lords of Salem, Zombie is able to fuse the anarchic, destructive, nihilist, and sentimental, cautiously pure-hearted, melancholic poles of his creative vision into powerfully layered images and sequences.
The problems In A Violent Nature are most visible in miniature — in the choppy, sloppy decisions characterized by insecurity that Nash makes with respect to how best to frame his enigmatic anti-hero. He has created a character that is more complex, narratively, than he was prepared to approach, technically. That touches on the true issue with the film — Nash’s lack of vision. There is a vision animating In A Violent Nature. It is more visionary than I would say 85% of horror movies I have seen in the past 10ish years. But 85% of horror movies are always going to be complete garbage. There are traces, patches, moments, glimpses of a distinct vision for the film here. One scene which renders it most clearly is the scene where the entity picks up a toy car keychain thrown unknowingly by one character into the woods, where it lands right at the entity’s feet. Another character walks into the woods to retrieve it, but the entity is distracted, the child’s curiosity momentarily overtaking the primal, post-mortal urge to stalk and kill. It’s played up a little too hammily, but it’s still affecting. Here the audience is presented with a layered image. A crudely layered image, but one that still rings with irreducible complexity.
But it doesn’t last. Nash succumbs to another atrocious trend in contemporary horror — the contrasting of brutal violence and abject horror with unexpectedly twee, cutesy, “bonkers”-coded elements. Take the “#1 Motherfucker” trucker hat or the excruciatingly twee needle drop at the film’s finale. The compulsion to balance (read: undercut) tension, brutality, and the intoxicating downward spiral with bloodless, cloying, cuteness reaches for the dizzyingly heterogeneous yet forward-mobilized patchwork of a canvas like Sam Raimi’s but usually just betrays an intolerance toward actual blood and guts that, frankly, is hard to respect in a horror filmmaker. This intolerance can also be seen in how clean and precise Nash and editor Alex Jacobs’ cuts are during kill scenes. I watched certain scenes on multiple devices to make sure I wasn’t mishearing that particularly brutal slashes and stabs were soft-pedaled in post, as if you can hear the editor holding his breath and closing his eyes as each punch lands on his subjects.
Squeamishness is probably the quality that I recoil from most in a horror film director. It’s why I absolutely, just completely loathe Barbarian, a film that is scared of blood, scared of boobs, scared of aging, scared of dying, scared of its own audience above all. Nash’s squeamishness is easy to detect here, especially in the lauded “yoga kill” which paradoxically reveals itself in its confrontationally direct framing and precious circumvention of the bare reality of violence, which doesn’t politely pause so its victims can chastely vamp for the camera one more time.
No, Nash’s vision doesn’t cohere. It’s fragmentary, with enough pieces left unpossessed by a force greater than their sum. But there is a force, there is a vision that I find compelling, that, like in Halloween II, floods in between scenes, in forgettable interstitial moments. In the film’s less studied and less contrived moments. The near-subjective POV shots of the entity compelled me not because they “brought the art house to the grind house” as one review I will never be able to unread cringily suggested, but because they’re quiet and observational. That isn’t a mode you often come across in contemporary horror. Contemporary horror is marked by an appalling, obstinate, and arrogant indifference toward life. Toward the profundity of horrors that characterize the organic world — rot, myopia, cannibalism, doubling, fractal disintegration. It is these micro and macro processes, too small and large to see with human eyes, that we unconsciously recreate, our biology marching us unwilling toward destruction and isolation. Instead we get canceled actor running away from ugly naked grandma and uneducated porn star running away from ugly naked grandma.
Nash’s style, despite its vulnerabilities, also proves itself open-eared and attentive, with a rare capacity for patience and the ability to build narrative beats around things other than shocking revelations, kills, and terrible needle drops. The switch in perspective from the entity to the final girl in the end is one I’m actually intrigued by. It has been interpreted by many to be a final defeat in Nash’s effort to maintain his focus on the killer. Constructing a film entirely around a killer’s POV is too tiresome and difficult to abide; he eventually just gives up and switches back to the customary female-victim-hero perspective. I don’t see it that way. If In A Violent Nature was helmed by someone with a more capacious vision, or if Nash is able to expand his, I could see this switch as a novel way of visualizing the psychic transference that always occurs between victim and slasher. A phenomenon that is most easily studied as far as recent cases go in a film that was far more widely hated than this one — Halloween Ends. I wrote about Halloween Ends’ rich and complex character dynamics elsewhere on this blog, and I think that DGG finally tapped into the crude, unavoidable, yet endlessly manipulable psychosexual dynamics that undergird every slasher in that film, and I think Nash had the potential to add one fascinating new player to the mix here — nature.
The natural world could have been the conduit by which the energy that mobilizes our perspective behind the entity shifts onto his final would-be victim. That isn’t even close to what happens. I am describing a movie that only I watched in my head. In In A Violent Nature, the perspective seems to jump only to heighten tension. The entity is relegated to a mood device, a Chekhov’s gun. We know by the film’s final chapter that this bitch walks. He’s always walking toward that locket, but he gets it back. What will happen now that the final keeper of the locket has escaped him without it? Will he pursue her? If he does, will he find her? Boring! That is just a slasher, and In A Violent Nature contained flashes of something more transcendent too many times before for me to ignore what it could be. The natural world is beautifully captured here, but Nash doesn’t do much with it. His aesthetic strategies harness a considerable amount of power that he squanders on unremarkable kill scenes. But his creation, the entity, the unnervingly alive natural world that forms a corona around his path, the various diversions he falls into, even some of the characters — the Dan Stevens-dupe park ranger especially. There is enough there to mark In A Violent Nature as a cut above the rest.
