In a Violent Nature 2 (2026): Less Walking But Somehow Slower

Full disclosure up front. I was very lukewarm on the original In a Violent Nature back in 2024. The slow, voyeuristic killer POV experiment had its admirers, and I understood the appeal on paper, but it never fully landed for me. With Chris Nash handing directing duties over to Nathaniel Wilson for the sequel while staying on as writer and producer, I went in curious whether a sequel would be able to deliver something different. Did it? Sort of. Kind of. Let’s talk about it.

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The Saturday Night Secret Screening I watched was a locked cut, though I’m told the score and some VFX work were still being finalized, so keep that in mind if anything I mention here shifts slightly by the time this actually hits screens. The film picks up I think the day after the first. Johnny (Ry Barrett, returning to swing his hooks one more time) heads to a summer camp, where he crosses paths with a young, outcast camper forced to spend the night with his counselor sister and her friends at their annual end-of-season party. It’s a much more linear plot than the original attempted, and that choice pushes the sequel considerably closer to a conventional slasher than its predecessor ever wanted to be.

That shift cuts both ways. There are some genuinely good comedic bits scattered throughout, including one character whose eyeliner makes him look uncannily like J.D. Vance, which is the kind of detail I did not expect to be distracted by in a Johnny movie but here we are. About twenty minutes in, the film is still teasing gory bits without committing to an actual kill, which tests patience early. When the kills finally do arrive, though, they go hard, inventive and nasty in exactly the way this franchise has built its reputation on.

The problem is the film runs into a lot of the same issues the original did. It’s basically an FX reel and not much else, and there’s real substance missing underneath all that gore. The pacing suffers for it too, with stretches that are quite literally just characters sitting around eating snacks, killing time until the next set piece. There are attempts at genuinely artistic shots throughout, some interesting spotlight work in particular, but the overall impact of trying to build a functional narrative is that the film feels plodding, both figuratively and very literally (so much walking). This thing moves slowly. The Terrifier crowd is going to eat up the kills. It wasn’t enough for me.

To the film’s credit, the location itself looks fantastic, all that dense summer camp woodland photographed with a real eye for atmosphere. And thematically, the sequel makes a clear, almost defiant choice. The new slashers here have no real motivation beyond simply existing, violence purely for the sake of violence, and there’s no lingering interest in moralizing any of it the way older slasher cinema used to gesture at doing. It’s casual violence, presented flatly and without commentary, which some viewers will find refreshingly honest and others will find hollow. I landed somewhere in the middle. Its not my bag but I appreciate the FX and the nihlism of the take.

There’s also a clever structural swap buried in here that I appreciated more than almost anything else in the film. Rather than centering a traditional final girl, the film hands its point of view over to the sidekick instead. Its the young outcast camper with the shaved head, giving the whole thing a bit of a Friday the 13th Part III energy, if that film had decided to follow the kid brother around camp instead of the sister/final girl.

In a Violent Nature 2 doesn’t fully solve the problems I had with the original, and in some ways it trades that film’s hypnotic strangeness for something more conventional without gaining much in return. But the kills are strong when they land, the location work is genuinely gorgeous, and handing the perspective over to an unlikely protagonist gives the sequel a small spark of identity the franchise might build on.

In a Violent Nature 2 had its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest, running September 17 through 24 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin.