‘Sickness’ swarms the living
What comes at night in “It Comes at Night” is the contagion that has turned “the city” into a necropolis from which the living have fled, hoping to outrun “the sickness” that has killed everyone else.
In a paradoxically bucolic North American forest (if the Garden of Eden were in hell, this would be it), an armed, 40-ish married couple, Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), live with their 17-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Paul’s father, Bud (David Pendleton).
The staring, lesion-covered grandfather has the sickness, and in brutal opening scenes, we see Paul and Travis, wearing respirators and heavy gloves, roll the dying, but not dead, Bud in a wheelbarrow into the woods, where they place him in a shallow grave. Paul mercy kills the old man with a rifle, and he and Travis burn the body with gasoline, something perhaps inadvisable if you don’t want to attract attention. Inevitably, someone shows up in the night at the large, boardedup wooden house in the woods, a masked young man named Will (Christopher Abbott, “Girls”), who claims to have a wife and son, a spooky little boy (redrum), in need of water not far away.
So what would you do under these circumstances: risk taking in potentially sick and perhaps untrustworthy people? Or would you show the mercy that is the core of almost every religion to strangers and risk your family? An indie, post-apocalyptic drama recalling John Hillcoat’s neglected “The Road,” “It Comes at Night” was written and directed by Texan prodigy Trey Edward Shults, whose 2015 release “Krisha,” a film about the baddest bad sheep you’ve ever met, is even scarier than “It Comes at Night.”
Shults, who has some things in common with Brit filmmaker Ben Wheatley (“Sightseers,” “High-Rise”), is a major talent whose new, creepy genre movie is a calling card to the mainstream.
“It Comes at Night” is full of intimate little touches you don’t expect in a low-budget genre movie. Travis eavesdrops on Will, his pretty, young wife, Kim (Riley Keough), and their weird son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), enjoying listening to a young family he will perhaps never grow up to have, and undoubtedly hoping for the sound of sex play. One night, the house is filled with the sound of Travis’ parents making love, a subversive act in a dying world.
Travis, who eerily resembles a young Barack Obama, repeatedly dreams of a tormented Bud and contracting the sickness himself. In many ways, “It Comes at Night” also recalls the granddaddy of all “Living Dead” films, “Night of the Living Dead,” especially insofar as its protagonist is an African-American male — Travis’ parents are interracial — but even that detail makes us worry even more for Travis if you think about it.
(“It Comes at Night” contains violence, profanity and disturbing images.)