31 Days of Horror- Day 3: It Comes at Night (2017)

(dir. Trey Edward Shults)

A24

A family struggles to survive in the aftermath of a disease outbreak, but their tightly regimented domestic lives begin to crumble when they accept a new family into their home.

It Comes at Night was my most anticipated film of the summer, so much so that I avoided watching any marketing released after the initial teaser. Shults’ previous film, Krisha, while not being a horror film, is a masterclass experiment in maintaining tension. That film, like It Comes at Night explores the fragile nature of domestic life and how a misunderstanding of the outsider(s) can have ruinous results. It Comes at Night clearly fits within Shults burgeoning filmography, but surprisingly the tension within this film doesn’t have the same clenched grip as his family drama. There’s no doubt that It Comes at Night is admirably made, and performed. Shults carefully takes us through this family’s living space, highlighting the shadows and the family portraits on the wall while emphasizing the lost humanity and hidden darkness that has begun to take hold. He catches the reflective surfaces on the gas masks our characters wear to protect them from disease, drawing our attention to how the flames of their cremated dead consume their vision. There’s little doubt that Shults, at 28 years of age, has an impressive future ahead of him. Likewise, the performances are notable. Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and Kelvin Harrison Jr. form the central family of Paul, Sarah, and Travis respectively. Edgerton and Ejogo gives calculated performances as parents trying to maintain family order, with Edgerton given the meatier role as the patriarch whose understanding of survival sometimes comes across as cruelty. But really it’s Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s performance as Travis that is the most impressive as he tries to create a sense of optimism among his family while nightmarish dreams point to sinister forces at work. Additionally, Christopher Abbot and Riley Keough create hidden depths within their characters, Will and Kim, parents who along with their young son move in with Paul’s family in order to share resources. There’s so much that seems hidden in It Comes at Night, forces at play beyond human mistrust and paranoia. But the secrets that are there, remain hidden which ultimately makes It Comes at Night frustratingly disappointing.

There are traces of John Carpenter’s themes from The Thing within It Comes at Night as the division between these two families becomes more apparent. But in It Comes at Night, the tension and paranoia no longer seems fresh. We’ve seen this scenario of escalating domestic paranoia and fear of infection play out in various forms of media, most recently in Z for Zachariah, The Walking Dead and video game, The Last of Us. While It Comes at Night is well acted and directed, the narrative at play doesn’t carry the spore of unfamiliarity for it to take hold and grow into something frightful. The dialogue, like the narrative is expected and never pops with its own voice. But It Comes at Night is carried by the idea that there is something supernatural, something predatory at work, as suggested by Trey’s dreams and the slaughtering of the family dog. But this doesn’t amount to anything that pushes the film beyond the boundaries of the familiar. If the purpose of It Comes at Night is to explore that people create the collapse of potential utopia through lies, suspicion, paranoia, and ultimately brutal acts of violence, then it’s not telling us something we don’t already know, something we haven’t already seen played out time and time again. In 2017, we need something more than that.

Scare Factor: 1/5 It Comes At Night is a horror movie that feels ashamed to announce itself as a horror movie. While there are moments of carefully crafted tension throughout, the film fails to deliver in its payoff with anything more than a notion we’ve seen explored within the genre numerous times. It Comes at Night didn’t need to provide clear cut answers, but it needed more material to think about than what it provides.