The best movies of the 2020s, so far: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

  Art stirs me and writing about it helps straighten me out. That said, I'm at a loss when it comes to my keyboard purge this time. I haven't posted anything about In A Violent Nature yet, despite wanting to, because it's just too dense. I've tried, multiple times, to dredge my feelings from my turbulent brain but they clamor, bottleneck, and die in my frontal lobe. So many specific verbs, adverbs and adjectives this movie conjures clog me the fuck up. For a while I worried that if I gave my cascading thoughts any momentum they'd snowball and I wouldn't be able to stop the avalanche. But the truth is that no linguistic arrangement is satisfying enough because this movie exists on such a specific wavelength as it's predicated on our histories with other movies but also fiercely original.

  

  For what it is—from the perspective its director, Chris Nash, gives us—there's so much to unpack from so many different angles. By doing something so minimalist, observant and ambient, it's given me the complete opposite reaction: maximalist analysis. It's so subtly clever in how it bucks tradition while also not changing things that I'm not just watching and analyzing the movie itself but how it fits into the slasher subgenre and picking apart what it does, what it doesn't do, and the WHYs therein.

  While I don't share their enthusiasm for this movie, this must be how some people felt when they first saw SCREAM: an exuberant awe at someone doing something so different.

  Sometimes we'll hear cliche conversations happening in the distance or in the periphery of our killer Johnny's orbit; warnings, lore, and other exposition relegated to the margins. More intimately, there's a great scene where Johnny takes a rest by a tree to play with a toy car because, like Michael, Jason, and Leatherface, Johnny is a giant kid. It's such a tranquil moment that functions successfully because of the established authenticity of the rest of this world's absurdity.

  Since this is, like, Part 6 or 7 of some slasher franchise outside of time there's no shortage of off-kilter dialog and acting but, impressively enough, it doesn't try to wink about how bad it all is: it embraces it head-on. There's no snarky postmodern meta analyses, ala Scream, nor any genre gentrification for 'elevation'. Realistically, this is exactly how the characters in one of these movies would sound. The Friday The 13th-meets-Terrence Malick clash speaks loudly enough without insecure, pseudo-clever snootiness masking artistic self-harm; its nose remains because there's no spite in its heart. If Nash were to try and clean this movie up, he'd out himself as a poser. Thus the only thing he changes is the perspective while retaining the good stuff: creative kills with buckets of blood and creepy sound design. He also mines a fuckton of tension from this angle.

  The way Golden Rules and Genre Expectations are married here is fucking sublime, especially the ending. We all know that the less we see of the killer, the scarier it is. And we all know the killer is never really gone, it's predictable that he/it will come back at some point at the end. OR: that anyone who helps our final girl isn't to be trusted, they're pretending to help to deliver her back to our antagonist. Nash knows what we know and we know he knows what we know, so he works from there. We don't see the killer, Johnny, but because of genre conventions we're waiting for him to pop back up. Shockingly, he never does. Nash suspends us in air, bound by our expectations, and leaves us to die. This immensely tense sequence just goes on and on for an agonizing 15 minutes (and I know 15 minutes doesn't sound long for a runtime but it's a hell of a long time to be dragged blindfolded).

  Truly one of the best endings to a horror movie this decade. It hinges upon a truly inspired concept, great comic timing, and a deconstructionist spirit that doesn't treat its dismembered parts like trash.