Review: It Comes at Night
The film begins with a close-up of a man obviously riddled with a disease of some kind. His name is Bud and there is a figure beside him wearing a gas mask. It is his daughter Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), overcome with what appear to be guilt and sadness. Her husband Paul (Joel Edgerton) and teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) cart Bud's body out into the woods, shoot him dead, and burn his body.
Welcome to It Comes at Night, Trey Edward Shults' sophomore effort, which definitively builds on the promise of his critically lauded debut, Krisha. Setting the tale in a post-apocalyptic world, Shults deals with elements familiar to anyone who has seen a supernatural or zombie film, but reworks them so that the familiar feels almost fresh and unsettling. There is a disease that has ravaged the world, forcing families such as Paul's to shutter themselves in for fear of contracting the illness or of being attacked by other survivors scouring the area for food.
One night, the family is awakened by sounds of intrusion and discover an interloper in the form of Will (Christopher Abbott) who, during the next day's interrogation in the woods, reveals to Paul that he was merely looking for water to take back to his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and child some 50 miles away. Paul is naturally suspicious until Will offers to trade some of their animals for water. Sarah convinces her husband that it might be a good idea to move Will's family in - the more people they are, the better they can defend their home. Soon the two families are settling in for an harmonious domesticity. The arrangement eventually begins to strain when a series of events lead Paul into thinking that Will might not have been telling the truth about how he came to their house and that the couple's son might be infected. Both sides resort to desperate measures in order to ensure their survival.
Shults mines a great deal of suspense from so minimalist a narrative. It Comes at Night traffics not in the gross-out (though there are scenes of slimy black ooze dripping from mouths), but in the slow creeping dread that burrows under one's skin as people inch down long and dark corridors illuminated by a single lantern. A scene with the family dog barking at something in the woods recalls the square scene from Dario Argento's Suspiria though nothing, not even the tense showdown at the film's climax, ever reaches Argento's level of hysteria. Though Shults and his actors, especially Edgerton, do remarkable work, there's something not wholly realised in the film. It may be because certain elements - such as Travis eavesdropping on Will and his Kim, his fascination with Kim, and the nightmares that plague him - don't have any genuine pay-off. Nevertheless, as an exercise in slow burn dread and suspense, It Comes at Night is a gripping work that is a prime example of how what is unseen is far more frightening than what is revealed.
It Comes at Night
Directed by: Trey Edward Shults
Written by: Trey Edward Shults
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Pendleton, Griffin Robert Faulkner
