It Comes at Night

With its ominous title, poster art and even the ad campaign, you would be forgiven for thinking that It Comes at Night is a horror film.  And while it certainly does contain elements of a thriller with its claustrophobic settings of a boarded up house located in the middle of a mysterious forest where strange sounds can be heard off in the distance, this really is a devastatingly sad film about paranoia.  I have a hunch that the mainstream summer audience isn't going to get behind this one very much, but if you're looking for something very dark and incredibly powerful, you really can't go wrong.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults throws us into the middle of a post-apocalyptic world with little answers as to what is going on.  From its opening scene, where three people donning gas masks take an elderly and obviously sick old man out into the woods to end his life, we can tell that the world is in ruin, and obviously at the mercy of some kind of plague.  We never learn the full effects or what the disease even is, but the people inhabiting a boarded up home in the middle of the woods are obviously doing whatever they can to keep it out.  We are introduced to these people, which include survivalist father Paul (Joel Edgerton), his concerned wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and their sensitive 17-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.).  The elderly man we see in the beginning is Sarah's father, who had contracted the disease.  Paul and Travis take him out in the woods, kill him, and then burn his body.  This act lingers with Travis, as he will be haunted by nightmares concerning his grandfather throughout the film.

The family lives day-by-day in their boarded up house, trying to stay one step ahead of whatever disease has taken out most of the world.  They take extreme security precautions to ensure their survival, but that security is compromised when a man named Will (Christopher Abbott) breaks in to look for supplies for his own family, thinking the house was abandoned.  Paul is suspicious of the man, and ties him up to a tree out back until he can make sure that Will is not sick.  When it appears that he is healthy, he listens to Will's story, learning that there is food and valuable supplies waiting with Will's family a good distance from Paul's home.  The two men go out for a few days to find Will's house, and when they return, they not only bring the promised food and supplies, but also Will's wife, Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner).  The two families live together peacefully under the same home for a while, but perhaps inevitably, tensions and paranoia begin to rise between them.  Not only that, but Travis' nightmares concerning the disease are only getting worse, and there seems to be something lurking just on the outskirts of the forest outside their door.

It Comes at Night is certainly not your conventional thriller, although it does fall back on a few classic tricks, such as "jump scare" nightmare sequences and plot misdirection.  Fortunately, it's doesn't try to throw us off too much, and is really just a simple, straight forward and slowly burning story about survival, and what happens when trust between people begins to break down.  It's the kind of movie where tension can be created just by the empty and quiet forest landscape that surrounds the boarded up home the characters inhabit, creating a quiet but no less ominous sense of dread.  Again, we have no hard evidence as to what is actually going on in the world, or what this disease is.  Some may find this frustrating or unnecessarily vague, but I think the fact that we don't know the whole story adds to the tension.  We don't know what could be out there, or what this disease could truly do to these people.  And when things start to fall apart and suspicion becomes rampant within the home, we find ourselves second-guessing these characters, and wondering just who is exactly telling the truth.

This is ultimately an emotionally wrenching film, and the performances are more than capable of creating a sense of paranoia, dread and mistrust.  Joel Edgerton stands out as the serious-minded type who goes above and beyond to help his family, but quickly learns that he has no control over the situation.  Likewise, Christopher Abbott as Will creates a sense that his character is perhaps a bit more hopeful and agreeable, but loses it during the course of the film.  We can see the trust within him die, and by the climax, he might no longer know what to think about anything that is going on around him.  Also of note is Kelvin Harrison, Jr as the young Travis, who mostly acts as the film's narrator.  We see much of the events through his eyes, and even though he has little dialogue, he delivers a no less powerful performance as someone who may be too young and naive to fully grasp the situation, but is horrified by what he does know.  As for Ejogo and Keough, they both get individually powerful moments, especially near the end.

It Comes at Night is so relentlessly grim, it could have seemed overwhelming.  But the filmmakers know just how to handle such a dark story.  It is powerful, well-acted, and above all a memorable and emotional experience.  And while I question the studio's judgement to release it right in the middle of the big summer movie season, I am nonetheless glad it's here, as it severs as a powerful antidote to many of this summer's big budget disappointments thus far.

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