OH, THE HORROR, THE HORROR — OF FAMILY RELATIONS
It Comes at Night focuses on the monster sitting next to you at the dinner table
I went into this movie expecting a horror — my least favourite genre, although I can recognize and even enjoy them when they’re done well; recent standouts include The Witch, The Babadook and It Follows.
But the good news is that It Comes at Night is not really a horror movie at all. That’s also the bad news, since the trailer and even the title promise as much; if that’s what drew you in, you’ll be going home disappointed.
The story opens on an almost tender note, if you can refer to shooting someone through the head and then burning the body as tender. The victim is grandpa Bud, who has succumbed to a horrible plague and now has to be dispatched and disposed of before the rest of the family catches it.
They are Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and their 17-year-old son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and although the movie is short on specifics, we soon gather that most of the rest of humanity is gone. Holed up in a country cottage with a supply of gas masks, a gun, access to fresh water and two locked doors forming a kind of airlock to the outside world, they’re as safe as one can hope to be in post-apocalyptic times.
But the status quo changes when a bedraggled stranger breaks in one night. He’s Will (Christopher Abbott), and he’s foraging for his own wife and child, who are not too many miles away in their own forest redoubt.
Sarah and Travis are sympathetic; Paul less so. One of the most interesting things in writer/director Trey Edward Shults’ screenplay is the way it forces us to examine the costs of kindness to strangers, and when they outweigh responsibility to one’s own family.
And one of the least interesting things is the way Travis’s bad dreams are used to inject a little old-school horror into the proceedings. It probably doesn’t help him sleep when his bedroom
wallpaper looks to have been designed by Hieronymus Bosch in one of his more hellish moods. Or, you know, that the world’s been all but wiped out by a plague. But this has to mark the first time I’ve seen a kid’s spooky drawings in a movie that turned out to be merely his imagination.
It Comes at Night works best in the moments when it drills down into the social dynamics of the six survivors. Paul is about 10 years older than Will, which is just enough to make him suddenly feel like the elder statesman, when just a few days earlier he was still his (living), father’s son. Travis, bad dreams aside, is gawky and curious about the newcomers.
And there’s a great mealtime scene in which Paul lays out the house rules. Imagine the awkwardness of telling some dinner guests you don’t know very well that you’d like them to remove their shoes, to make sure they don’t leave the baby gate open, and to jiggle the toilet handle so it doesn’t run on — except these guests will also be moving in with you.
I haven’t seen Shults’ first film, Krisha (2015), but given that it takes place over a family’s Thanksgiving weekend gettogether, I’m intrigued already. Seems like the best bits of his new movie have already been expanded into their own feature.