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Movie Review: “It Comes At Night” Is A Gripping, Intimate Thriller

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Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son, but this will soon be put to test when a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.

In “It Comes at Night”’s brutal opening scene, we learn that what appears to be a contagious airborne disease has infected much of the population, including an old man whose family is tragically forced to end his life so that they can go on living. It’s the type of tough decision that often comes at the end of zombie films, but here it is used to great effect in an introduction that, despite bringing us into a world that will feel familiar to any fan of the genre, establishes a thriller that is far more concerned with the horrors of humanity and interpersonal relationships than anything having to do with the supernatural or science-fictional.

The family lives in a boarded up, isolated house in which the primary forms of protection include firearms, gas masks, and rules which are strictly enforced by Paul (Joel Edgerton), husband of Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and father of the teenaged Travis (Kevin Harrison Jr.). As the title suggests, the most vital rule is that they must never go out at night unless it is absolutely necessary. One night, a man attempts to break into their house, and after capturing and interrogating the intruder, Paul learns that his name is Will (Christopher Abbott), and that he was only searching for water to take back to his own wife and son. In an effort to pool resources, Paul accompanies Will to retrieve Kim (Riley Keough) and toddler Andrew (Griffin Faulkner), and invites the family to stay in his house. An alliance forms as the two families attempt to survive the outside world, but as the tensions rise, it becomes apparent that it’s the air inside, itself contaminated by paranoia and fear, that poses their greatest threat.

This is the second film from writer/director Trey Edward Shults, whose brilliant debut “Krisha,” while not a traditional horror film, is a terrifying and deeply uncomfortable family drama that gets all the way into the head of its troubled protagonist. “It Comes at Night” is a similarly unnerving, but it’s dirtier and more stripped-down. By putting his characters in an impossibly desperate situation, Shults allows for an even more distilled examination of human urges, family formation and the behaviors that arise when people feel genuinely afraid for themselves and for the people they care about most.

“It Comes at Night” is not attempting to tell a story we haven’t seen before, but by making the characters ignorant of what exactly has happened, the film is able to spare us of the likely banal origin of this particular apocalypse, and make it easier for us to relate to these people. It isn’t a particularly fun film either; jump scares are largely absent, instead, the film uses creepy imagery, dark cinematography, and an at-times jarring soundtrack to create a suspenseful atmosphere. The film spends most of its runtime showing us what makes these people tick, and the dynamics between different characters shifts in interesting ways over the course of a few days. They almost never explicitly articulate their true emotions to each other, or to the audience, but the actors do a lot with these roles that often require them to be restrained. Ejogo and Keough are talented actresses who do a great job as more-than-capable women, but they don’t get nearly as much to do as Edgerton, Abbott or Harrison, all of whom shine in an intense (but not quite explosive) third act that really puts their characters through the wringer.

“It Comes at Night” is (somewhat surprisingly) getting a wide release in its opening weekend. Maybe it will be a hit, but I suspect that for many it will be too dark, too quiet – too full of despair. Shults was presumably working with a substantially larger budget this time (as well as the support of the hottest independent distributor around in A24), and while he has certainly improved the production values, it is still very much a small-scale, fairly experimental film. That’s not to say this isn’t an impressive step forward for Shults, but you get the sense that if he had the ambition to make a larger, more mainstream film, he could almost certainly pull it off. But there is no doubt that more than a few will be able to appreciate such an effective, character-driven film from a talented young auteur.

In theaters Friday, June 9th

 

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