Maybe they weren't happy with not getting what they were advertised or maybe they just didn't like the movie outright, but I wanted to give you two crucial pieces of information about It Comes At Night dear reader that'll help you enter the film with better expectations; the first is that this is not at all the Conjuring-esque traditional horror movie the ads are selling and the second is that It Comes At Night is a great movie, a thought-provoking investigation into survivalism in a world gone awry. It lacks elements like jump scares and over-the-top gore that many crowd-pleasing but artistically lacking horror films have in spades but instead carries a haunting atmosphere and a bleak tone that isn't afraid to get as nasty as it needs to.
The world has gone to Hell in It Comes At Night, which is written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. There is no opening text crawl to inform us what has befallen humanity nor do we get a glimpse at how all this apocalyptic chaos started. All we, the viewer, know, as the story begins in media res, is that some sort of sickness has befallen humanity, which leaves the few surviving human beings to fend for themselves and live off scant supplies and even less hope. Paul (Joel Edgerton) takes care of his family in a small shack in a woodland area, with his family consisting solely of his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). They live out their days carrying out a simpler existence, with Paul enacting harsh rules in order to keep his family safe and free from the sickness that has ravaged the planet.
Their solitary existence comes to a close one day when a man, Will (Christopher Abbott), comes to their house asking for help for himself and his own family. Paul agrees to let them into their home and that's where the slow-burn terror begins to set in. But all of that terror emerges in a subdued manner, nobody's running out of closets with a chainsaw in this movie. No, the more eerie atmosphere comes about simply from the arrival of three strangers into a families rigidly established own routine and dynamic, with subtle tension materializing out of elements like Will becoming something akin to a father figure to Travis in certain situation (like when Will teaches Travis how to chop firewood) much to Paul's chagrin.
Examining what it's like for a family to cope with unexpected and tumultuous elements was a key component of writer/director Trey Edward Shults last movie, the excellent Krisha, and though he incorporates a more stylized set-up involving the gradual death of the human race into the proceedings, the very same understanding of real family dynamics and creating interesting characters that register as real people that made Krisha so absorbing crop up again here, with Shults also carrying over the intense atmosphere of his previous film for It Comes At Night to similarly strong results. While Krisha got it's nerve-wracking uncertainty from the actions of its titular character, Shults here uses man's instinct to survive and protect what is his to create plenty of sequences thriving on ardent unpredictability.
To convey the more brutal nature of mans innate desire to live no matter what, it was a great decision to get Joel Edgerton for the lead role as Paul, a father who has no problem using violence to protect himself or the ones he loves. His family, his home, his food, that's all Paul has in this hellish world and Edgerton is able to convey that idea through his body language and performance that evenly balances out a sense of desperation and intimidation. Kelvin Harrison Jr. leaves quite the impression as Travis, a normal kid trying to come to terms with the vicious circumstances he has to endure each day while it's fantastic that Carmen Ejogo finally got a post-Selma role with some substance to it with her role as Sarah in It Comes At Night.
The actors equip themselves super well with Shults distinctive aesthetic that makes one terrified as to what could come next. Also putting in incredible work with the type of tone established by Shults is cinematographer Drew Daniels (who also did the cinematography for Krisha), he gets tons of memorable shots out of seemingly ordinary locations like the woods or an overhead shot of Travis in his attic peering out a window hoping to see his father return. So many of the startling images found in It Comes At Night stick with you and help augment the tone of the entire motion picture in a quite essential manner. The scares here are, again, not jump scares that come and go in a flash, rather, the cinematography by Drew Daniels instead creates frames that leave one with this queasy eerie feeling that's hard to shake.
Similarly hard to forget is the climax of It Comes At Night, which goes whole-hog in culminating the films plot in as bleak of a manner as possible. Make no mistake, this is a darker movie throughout, but this particular segment of the feature holds back no punches on depicting the horrors of this world. What transpires there was so intense to behold I could barely move once it was all over! Perhaps It Comes At Night was not the movie many in my screening thought or hoped it it would be, but for me, I was transfixed by Trey Edwards Shults examination of one family trying to survive desolate situations and refusing to give easy or tidy answers to their predicament. There is plenty of unflinching brutality in It Comes At Night as well as an even larger amount of superb filmmaking.
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