Movie Review—It Comes at Night

It Comes at Night

by Peter J. O’Connell     

It Comes at Night. Released: June 2017. Runtime: 91 mins. MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing images, and language.

It Comes at Night, written and directed by Trey Edward Shults, focuses on a family that might be considered an American ideal—in some respects. Three generations—beloved grandfather, father with a professional background, loving mom, bright son—live together in a natural setting, and they’re interracial to boot. But there’s a problem, you see.

There’s this highly contagious pandemic that’s depopulating the world like a medieval plague. And no one knows exactly how the disease is spread. But if you do catch it, it kills you—horribly. And Grandpa (David Pendleton) has caught it. So early on in the movie, as an act of mercy, Grandpa has to be “put down,” shot by his teenage grandson, Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), and his body burned by Travis’ father, Paul (Joel Edgerton).

To deal with the menace to this American family, Paul, formerly a teacher, has become a gun-wielding paranoid patriarch, who has located his family in a house in the woods and boarded over the windows and doors, except for two, the front room’s outer door and the door leading to that room. These doors are always to be kept locked. Paul, his wife, Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and Travis must wear gloves and gas masks whenever they go outside.

It is as if the family is living in a situation that is a kind of combination of the besieged “outpost of civilization” familiar from many classic movies and a troubled spaceship from science-fiction—think of that “two-door access” and those gas masks. This combined situation reflects the mysterious nature of the source spreading the disease. Some creepy scenes somewhat bring to mind such possibilities as zombies or other monstrous creatures, perhaps space aliens—Paul hasn’t built a “big, beautiful wall,” so presumably illegal aliens aren’t to blame—or human deplorables of various kinds. (Some rednecks do put in a brief, bloody appearance.)

A challenge for Paul’s family fortress arrives in the persons of another family seeking shelter—Will (Christopher Abbott), Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son, Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Paul is very suspicious of the three, but eventually he yields to Sarah’s position that the more people they have with them, the easier it will be to defend themselves should anyone else come across their location.

The two families get along well for a time. In fact, there are almost some romantic sparks between Travis, who has been suffering from the strain of the family’s situation, and Kim. But the era of good feelings doesn’t last long. One night things start to go very, very bad—and it’s not because of monsters, aliens, or rednecks. The “it” that “comes” is already inside the family fortress, inside the hearts and minds of the family members.

 It Comes at Night is a tightly directed film that comes close to getting maximum impact from its rather minimal plot and setting. Shults’ cinematography (by Drew Daniels) and  lighting techniques—mostly only the “actual” lighting, such as gunsight lights and flashlights--are quite effective in creating an almost constant sense of dislocation and mood of menace. And the subtly ominous score by Brian McComber contributes to the unsettling effect quite well. The acting by all concerned seems exactly right—the coiled intensity of Edgerton, the mix of gentleness and strength in Ejogo, and the work of the talented young actors Harrison and Keough. Particularly striking is a kitchen conversation between the latter two.

Shults’ film is one of a recent clutch of creative “horror” movies that remind one of the reply that Edgar Allan Poe made to a critic who had commented that Poe was purveying horror akin to that of German folk tales. Poe said: “The horror of which I write is not of Germany but of the soul.”