"Alright, buckle up."

The slasher movie has some of the most well established tropes of any subgenre, things that have become ingrained in the minds of horror movie fans and general audiences alike. This, naturally, makes the slasher genre ripe for deconstruction and subversion, something that many films have played with over the years to varying degrees of effectiveness. In a Violent Nature, the confidently assured feature directorial debut of writer/director Chris Nash, revels in this kind of trope subversion even if it's not a wholly successful undertaking.

In an otherwise serene wooded area somewhere in North America, some unseen teens find a locket hanging from a pipe and walk off with it. In doing so, they have unknowingly awoken a brute named Johnny (Ry Barrett)—a surrogate for Jason Vorhees with a similar backstory—who won't rest until he retrieves this beloved trinket that belonged to his deceased mother. Nash embeds the audience with Johnny, never giving us a chance to get too attached to any of the dead meat teens or unsuspecting backwoods locals. This almost completely removes the scary aspects one would expect from a horror movie, as Johnny is the one sneaking up on people and murdering them.

Comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick have run rampant since the film's first public screenings, but this is fairly superficial. The film certainly revels in long shots of our protagonist—such as he is—walking through the woods on his way to his next victim, and there are hallmarks of Malick's desire to strip away as much dialogue as possible to let the pictures tell the story. However, anyone going into In a Violent Nature looking for Terrence Malick's Friday the 13th is going to walk away let down.

There are many allusions throughout the film to past massacres, even introducing a character in the second act who is ostensibly the hero of some previous film we never saw. This was when the film was firing on all cylinders, delivering the feeling you'd get when watching some later slasher movie sequel on TV as a kid and attempting to piece together the plot of previous films through context clues. It's the sort of thing that will instantly hook any horror movie fans in the audience.

As an experiment in deconstructing the slasher movie genre and stripping it down to the point where you can't possibly care about any of the characters, it mostly succeeds. However, the last fifteen minutes are even more baffling as the film attempts to introduce an emotional connection to the film's final girl character Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), and runs into a major roadblock, one that completely and totally derails the whole endeavor.

In the interest of complete transparency, I saw this film in theaters several weeks ago and have been wrestling with this final sequence ever since, to the point where I waited to watch it again when it became available to stream. Upon a rewatch, even knowing that it's coming, I still couldn't abide this film's final act. It belabors the point it's attempting to make and even being familiar with the beats of the scene, I began to wonder if the film was ever going to end.

It's a real shame because the film is confidently and competently made. There's no doubt that what you're watching is 94 minutes of this director's relatively pure intentions, so nothing is in there accidentally. This makes the film's final movement all the more perplexing as the film eschews convention for over an hour and then decides that maybe a proper and full explanation of things is needed after all. The minimalism of the film's aesthetic really makes the maximalism and creativity of the various kills all the more fun to revel in.

If you're a horror hound or at least can appreciate a well constructed slasher movie, you're going to have a blast watching the first hour of In a Violent Nature. Siding the audience with the killer is a brilliant conceit and it pays off whenever Johnny takes down one of these more or less faceless victims. However, the attempt to switch focus in the third act is a terrible miscalculation that costs In a Violent Nature an ending as satisfying as the rest of the film. It's a damn shame too, because for an hour or so, there's nowhere else on earth you'd rather be than watching Johnny hack and slash his way through a bunch of horny teens.