It Comes at Night
In It Comes at Night, Trey Edward Shults’ tense thriller about a post-apocalyptic family trying to survive in their shuttered-up house in the woods on their own, the camera is always pushing in toward something, tracking down darkened hallways, through the deep, mossy woods, or toward the shocked face of one of the characters. It’s like being on a conveyor belt headed to a darkened doom.
It’s just one of the elements Shults employs to establish the taut, oppressive atmosphere of his survivalist drama, along with a pervasive hum of discomfort hidden deep in the depths of the audio, or the use of a jarring music score that is nearly Kubrickian in its tone and effectiveness.
That’s no accident, of course. Shults treats a survivalists’ house much the way Kubrick used the Overlook Hotel, the claustrophobia of being stuck in a boarded up, dimly lighted house echoing the pervasive mood of dread in the elongated hallways and spacious master rooms, whose architecture is never entirely clear. But whereas Kubrick turned the Stephen King novel into — among other things — a dense treatise on the cyclical nature of evil, Shults’ film doesn’t have an enormous amount to say, other than maybe it’s better to go early in the advent of a viral outbreak than to be the last humans standing.
Lead by patriarch Paul (Joel Edgerton), his wife, Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and teenage a son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) the family mostly stays holed up in their remote house exercising extreme caution, donning protective breathing masks at any hint of dangerous contact with an outsider who may or may not be infected. One night, a desperate man named Will (Christopher Abbott), attempts to break in the house. Paul initially holds him outside as a prisoner, but eventually relents and allows Will and his wife, Kim (Riley Keough), and young son, to join them, figuring there is strength in numbers. At first, things go well, and the families seem relieved to be able to spend time together, but Paul’s paranoia, and Will’s determination to protect his family at all costs, leads to rising tensions that build to an explosive conclusion.
The film is defiantly obscure: We never learn where this is taking place, or what it is, exactly, that happened that precipitated this horrific outcome — when Paul asks Will what if anything he knows, Will is equally unsure — but it’s similarly hazy about just what it is we should be in such fear of. At one point, the family dog tears off into the woods with Travis in hot pursuit, but the dog vanishes over
a hill and Travis is spooked by whatever it is he hears up there, an entity we never see, and isn’t referenced again.
Insomniac Travis — the film’s answer to Kubrick’s psychic Danny — whose sporadic sleep is interrupted by violent, terrifying visions, is about as close as we come to an emotional connection. His late-night scene with Kim, as the two of them discuss their dessert preferences, is one of the few times Shults lets up enough to allow his characters space to breathe.
It’s a nice scene, but there are precious few such moments. Instead, Shults continues to push his atmospheric gloom, allowing as little light into the proceedings as the boarded-up house itself. It’s clear what he’s going for, but with so little variation in tone, and with characters that remain largely unrealized — about the only thing we learn about Paul is his previous career was as a history teacher — the stakes never ratchet up beyond the film’s admittedly sharp visual stylings.
Whereas it’s absolutely true that the terror a film manages to conjure in our mind is far more potent than nearly anything we can see on screen, it takes a director with a deep understanding of human psychology and a genius for the subversive to really pull it off. Famously, we don’t actually see the shark in Jaws until the 80-minute mark, but with the clever use of an underwater pointof-view camera, and a script that resonates with its fine character work, we almost don’t need to. Its effectiveness comes from such strong implication that we’re forced to conjure the giant creature lurking in the ocean’s depths like something out of a primordial nightmare.
As strong a stylist as Shults may be, he still never quite captures the proper dissonance between the known and the terrifying unknown. It’s not without its creepiness and designated scares — despite its marketing, it’s much more of a taut thriller than horror movie, anyway — it’s that the slow burn of its misapprehended psychology only takes us so far before our attention begins to wane.