Violent Art Film or Nature Walk With Occasional Dismemberment?
In a Violent Nature has been hailed as a bold “ambient slasher,” a reinvention of the genre, and one of the year’s best horror movies according to more than a few critics.
Personally, it felt less like a movie and more like watching a murderous NPC slowly pathfind through the woods while my life expectancy ticked down.
This is a film that looks at the words “slow burn” and says, “What if we cut the ‘burn’?”
The Killer POV Gimmick That Forgets the “Fun” Part
The hook is undeniably cool on paper: we mostly follow undead killer Johnny from behind as he trudges through the Ontario wilderness, hunting down the teens who stole his locket. It’s shot in a boxed 4:3 ratio, often in long, static or drifting takes, with no musical score.
Critics have compared the style to slow cinema and even name-checked Terrence Malick and Gus Van Sant as influences.
Which is flattering, sure, but if you’re promising Friday the 13th and delivering Tree of Life with bonus neck trauma, some of us are going to feel a little catfished.
For long stretches, the movie is literally just Johnny walking. No dialogue. No score. Just boots, trees, and the occasional twig snap to remind you you’re still conscious. RogerEbert.com even describes it as feeling like “walk time” more than anything else—and they meant that as a compliment.
Imagine a slasher directed by your smartwatch’s step counter.
Plot, or: Things Happen Between Hikes
On the rare occasions something does happen, the story is aggressively straightforward:
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Teen idiots take a locket from a ruined fire tower.
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Johnny, a developmentally delayed local kid who died in a prank decades earlier, resurrects as an undead golem.
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He hunts them through the woods, killing them one by one.
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There’s some campfire exposition about his tragic backstory.
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We get a park ranger info dump about the locket being the key to his rest.
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One girl, Kris, tries to stop him and limp away from the carnage.
If you wrote this plot on a napkin, it would look like every VHS slasher from 1983. The big innovation is that instead of hanging out with the teens, you spend most of your time looming behind Johnny like his emotionally unavailable guardian angel.
The problem is, the movie doesn’t do much with that perspective beyond “we’re behind him now.” There’s almost no interiority, no twisted point-of-view work, not even much variation. We just… follow. Slowly. Through trees. For 94 minutes.
Gore: Extremely Rated R, Emotion: Very PG
To give the film its due, when it finally stops hiking and starts hacking, the kills are outrageous. Critics have called them some of the goriest and most elaborate they’ve seen in years.
You get:
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a log-splitter death that feels like it was storyboarded by a very angry lumberjack,
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a water kill that’s half spa day, half war crime,
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and enough practical effects to make you briefly forgive the preceding cardio.
Unfortunately, the kills are so spaced out and disconnected from any real character development that they land like little viral clips dropped into a very sleepy ASMR video. Even fans of the movie admit it strips away almost all traditional characterization from the victims on purpose.
That’s an interesting experiment in theory. In practice, it’s hard to care who dies when you barely remember who was who beyond “guy with gun” or “girl by the lake.” When Johnny finally gets to someone, it feels less like tragedy and more like a scheduling update.
Ambient or Just Absent?
The movie proudly calls itself an “ambient slasher,” which is a fancy way of saying, “What if we took a genre built on pace and tension and turned it into a vibes playlist?” Director Chris Nash has openly talked about avoiding music, embracing long static shots, and leaning into slow minimalism.
Some critics have loved that, praising the film as hypnotic, dreamlike, and even oddly serene.
Others, more diplomatically, call it an “artistic experiment” that’s intriguing but not entirely satisfying.
From the “bad review with dark humor” side of the aisle, it often plays less like atmospheric horror and more like being stuck behind the world’s slowest NPC in a forest level you can’t skip. The film seems so terrified of feeling like a regular slasher that it overcorrects into something that’s long on concept and short on actual, y’know, entertainment.
If classic slashers are junk food, In a Violent Nature is the salad made entirely of kale stems and theory.
Critical Darling, Audience Ambien
To be clear, critics have mostly been kind: Rotten Tomatoes had the film in the high 70s to mid-90s at various points, with a generally favorable Metacritic score around the high 60s.
Variety called its stripped-down approach distinctive; the New York Times praised its “ambitious blend of art house and slaughterhouse.”
Audiences, however, are a lot more “meh.” IMDb sits in the mid-5s out of 10 with a very mixed spread of votes, and even some horror fans have labeled it boring or pretentious despite admiring the kills.
Box office-wise, it made about $4.5 million worldwide on IFC’s widest-ever release: impressive for a tiny Canadian experiment, less impressive if you’ve been told this is the second coming of slasher cinema.
This is a movie that critics put on “Best of 2024 so far” lists while a chunk of viewers quietly use it as high-end background noise.
Ending on a Shrug and a Limp
Without spoiling every detail, the ending tries to pull a clever, reality-blurring rug-pull that recontextualizes Kris’s fate and Johnny’s nature. Some critics think it works; others (like IndieWire’s David Ehrlich) call the whole thing “interesting in theory, unsatisfying in execution.”
That tracks. By the time we reach the final stretch—Kris injured on the road, a kindly driver stopping, Johnny still looming in our imagination—the film wants that dread to feel cosmic, existential, like violence is a natural force you can never quite outrun.
But after 90+ minutes of walking simulator, it mostly just feels like, “Oh cool, we’re still here.”
Final Verdict: Great Wallpaper, Middling Movie
In a Violent Nature is not lazy; if anything, it’s trying very hard. It wants to deconstruct the slasher, critique our appetite for gore, and mash up art-house minimalism with backwoods carnage. It has striking images, killer practical effects, and a commitment to its bit that’s almost admirable.
But good intentions and clever framing don’t automatically equal a good time. When the big innovation boils down to “we stand behind the killer for an hour and a half,” you end up with a movie that’s more concept than experience—great to discuss on a podcast, less great when you’re in the theater wondering if you have time to pee during Johnny’s 14th tree walk.
If you’re deeply into experimental horror, slow cinema, and the idea of a slasher that mostly stares at moss, this might be your new favorite thing.
For the rest of us, In a Violent Nature plays like the worst kind of camping trip: long, quiet, strangely pretty… and you walk away mostly grateful it’s over, slightly sunburned, and unsure why you paid money to watch a guy in a mask do what your Fitbit does for free.
