I agree about the animalism, that seemed to be a theme they were hammering home throughout the film and what the woman who picks her up's speech is about and it's why the movie is titled In A Violent NATURE but it doesn't explain at all how he's like a brilliant tactician now (that walk around the cabin was really, really clever).
Again, I saw it as being instinctive as opposed to intelligent.
The second part of your post on the one hand does not resonate with me at all, I got none of those feelings and none of the reviewers I read took it that way, and yet it does make a kind of sense if one did take it that way so I will have to think about this more.
Yeah, it's just how I think about it and what makes sense to me, independent necessarily of what the film itself was trying to accomplish. I haven't read too much about the film because I haven't written up my official review and I usually like to get my own ideas down before reading other peoples'.
I was much more in tune to what crumbs was saying about this almost being like a Funny Games-style forcing you to look at the things you usually gawk at with a more contemplative eye about whether you should be entertained by it. The over the top kill of the yoga girl was played incredibly straight and I thought if anything it was either that misguided Leone way of "just how brutal can I possibly make this" or "what if we showed people just how brutal those over the top kills they laugh at really are". I thought it was absurdly brutal not absurd.
I think that's only really the case for me with what happens to the ranger, because in that scene we are asked to ponder the cruelty at hand and the suffering, and how for someone being harmed this way, five minutes feels like an eternity. With the other deaths, it was so over-the-top that I simply couldn't take it seriously. Going back to our earlier conversation about
Terrifier, sometimes I walk movies and have a really negative reaction to the idea of someone creating these sequences of torture/murder. But in this case, I thought it was creative and different and excessive without tipping into exploitation or cheap provocation.
But also, I think that I have a bit of a different POV on slashers in general. I don't need a huge body count. I like a creatively staged sequence, but I don't need to see boundaries being pushed in terms of tormenting people. If it was meant as a
Funny Games type chiding about enjoying/"enjoying" murder/fear, that doesn't really click for me. (And that could have been the actual intention of the film, but it's not how it scanned for me).
I mean, when the one guy is like "Hey, Johnny--" and then is immediately, definitively taken out, to me that is funny.
Now, I can see it as being more like a nature documentary, and that's another read that works for me. We've all watched terrified gazelles being taken out by a hungry lion. There's something very effective about not only the long sequences in the woods, but the fact that the petty interpersonal dramas and sex that would normally pad the space between kills has been replaced by walks in the woods.
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