Intense, gripping and subtle… whatever ‘It’ is
It Comes at Night 15 cert, 92 min
Dir Trey Edward Shults Starring Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Riley Keough, Christopher Abbott, Griffin Robert Faulkner
Post-apocalyptic is the mood of the moment in American movies, but It Comes at Night,a hair-pricklingly intense survival thriller from Trey Edward Shults, claws its way to the front of the pack. The exact nature of the titular “It” is the first of many potentially telling details the film clasps close to its chest – but whatever “It” is, it’s nasty, and in ways that can’t easily be shaken off.
The film opens on an elderly man (David Pendleton) whose daughter Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), her husband Paul (Joel Edgerton) and their son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr) seem to be preparing him for burial at speed. All three are wearing gas masks, whose blank visors and snout-like filters evoke the empty, beaked faces of medieval plague doctors – while the boils and black slime spattering the old man’s body send your imagination spiralling into the realms of the bubonic.
Yet It Comes at Night is less interested in this contagion and its consequences (are we talking about zombies here, or what?) than a more pressing threat to this family-ofthree’s ongoing survival: their fellow survivors. Early on, they take in another couple, Will (Christopher Abbott) and Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), who prove to be welcome company at first, but also disrupt the system for staying alive that Paul has carefully devised.
Horror films that turn the thumbscrews on small groups of strangers crammed together by a crisis have been around at least since George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) – while Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) recently took the concept to one logical extreme, by pitting its clashing bunker-dwellers against a kind of Schrödinger’s Apocalypse they couldn’t actually see or verify for themselves.
Shults’s approach is subtler, but no less balefully gripping. His film is intrigued first and foremost by the business of survival itself: what it takes, what it takes away from you, and where it leads. “The only people you can trust are family,” Paul sternly advises Travis – and the sentiment has an extra kick here, given the difference in the two men’s skin tones suggests (though again, it’s by no means spelt out) that Paul may not be Travis’s biological father.
Shults’s screenplay is seeded with potentially destabilising nuggets like this – if Paul is his stepfather, rather than flesh and blood, might that have repercussions at a critical moment? – and after you’ve toyed with them for a little while, they toy with you back, like balls of wool that grow claws of their own and start swatting the cat.
That uncertainty may irk viewers who are craving clear answers, but it lends the film the texture of a fitful dream. Think of Shults’s film – the 28-year-old Texan’s second, after his 2015 domestic drama Krisha – as the end of the world by lantern light: intimate and flickering up close, with unfathomable blackness beyond.