It Comes At Night

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SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     It Comes At Night is a psychological thriller from independent film company A24. Despite being relatively new on the block, A24 has gained some significant notoriety with recent successes like Ex Machina, Amy, Mississippi Grind, Room, and 2016’s Best Picture winner Moonlight. Like its fellow A24 releases (and writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ directorial debut Krisha), It Comes At Night styles itself as a film with a modest budget and big impact. Unfortunately, this is one instance where the plot can’t make up for lackluster set pieces.

     It Comes At Night finds Paul (Joel Edgerton), wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) living a harsh life in a house in the woods. A deadly virus has destroyed modern existence as we know it, making survival a struggle and outsiders into enemies. When newcomer Will (Christopher Abbott) happens upon their house, the family must decide whether or not they can trust him—and if the cost of trust is worth the price of survival.

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     To be sure, It Comes At Night has something to offer. There are some juicy scares to be found, but the movie truly thrives on its sense of mystery and downright creepiness. To its benefit, the film acknowledges and avoids several thriller tropes, so that just when the audience thinks they’ve figured out how it’s all going to finally fall apart, the script takes a sharp left and moves in an unexpected direction.

     In terms of craftsmanship, Shults has a few creative tricks up his sleeve, but for the most part the film does best when the camera stays still. In those moments, the eeriness of the middle-of-nowhere, forest setting kicks in to great effect (a la The Village).

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     In the vein of some recent (and very good) horror/thriller films like The Babadook, 10 Cloverfield Lane, It Follows, or Get Out, It Comes At Night tries very hard to preserve the mystery at its core. Rather than confront the viewer up front, it prefers to build up suspense slowly, with a gradually increasing sense of dread and disquiet. That model, which is borrowed from Jaws and ultimately Alfred Hitchcock, makes for a more mature movie that’s less dependent on jump scares and more unsettling in the long-term. It also tends to produce a more impactful ending.

     The problem is that if a movie is going to make an audience wait through a build-up, there had better be something satisfying, interesting, and hopefully horrifying at the end of the tunnel. That’s where It Comes At Night disappoints; far from impressing in its final moments, the third act leaves quite a bit to be desired. Perhaps Shults deserves some credit for avoiding another typical thriller trope: the shocking, last-minute twist that reorients the whole landscape of the movie. But with a sluggish pace throughout and very few real plot beats, It Comes At Night is in desperate need of something exciting. Instead, there’s simply not much payoff at all. The only real shock is that the credits roll when they do.

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     FINAL VERDICT: Although It Comes At Night has some admirable ambitions, its unsatisfactory third act makes the whole thing feel a bit like a popped balloon.

SPOILERY DELICIOUSNESS

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     The movie’s final act centers around the efforts of Paul and his family to get rid of the family of newcomers—including Will, his wife Kim (Riley Keough), and his son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). There are several storytelling strengths to be acknowledged here.

     For one thing, the movie preserves the mystery of Will’s trustworthiness to the bitter end. Your average horror flick might have dealt predictably with Will’s shifty story by making Will’s true intentions a dramatic revelation, but this film smartly leaves the audience unsure of whether he harbors secret motivations. That choice makes their execution at Paul’s hand all the more difficult—heaping on guilt to an already impossible situation.

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     It’s also worth mentioning that because the film preserves some ambiguity on that front, it has a more profound thematic resonance. The movie isn’t ultimately about woodland monsters or airborne disease; it’s about what a person could and should do in the name of survival (sacrifice a family? his or her own family?), the fear of outsiders, and the tragic consequences of paranoia. The story finally functions as a (potentially unwitting?) commentary on our current political and social challenges—and warns of the pitfalls on every side.

     Granted. Yet in a film that hypes mystery and sinister shadows around every corner, the dispassionate, traumatic, and admittedly horrific murder of Will and his family isn’t the type of payoff we were sold. Shortly thereafter, the ending of the movie abruptly arrives, heralded by the imminent and unmoving death of the rest of the characters—without any sense of the satisfaction the audience was looking for.

photo courtesy of filmschoolrejects.com