Directed by: Trey Edward Shults
Written by: Trey Edward Shults
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo
IMDb Link
I love when I can go in to a film with no idea about what the film is beforehand. I didn't see any trailers for this nor look it up on any sites, and just let the film have its time.
*Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead*
It Comes at Night is set in a post-apocalyptic world. People are dying out due to an unknown disease, and a man Paul (Edgerton), his Sarah wife (Ejogo), son Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), and their dog Stanley have put together a life with what remains, hiding out far from humanity to avoid infection in a boarded-up home, taking every precaution they can to avoid infection. The film opens with them having to kill the wife's infected father, which immediately showcases the film's grim tone. The death comes with a little emotion and regret about how they went about it, but it's very muted, a showing of the characters' acceptance of the necessity of the situation. We're not watching people break so much as we're watching broken people try to put some semblance of humanity back together. Their behaviour is regimented, in total focus of survival, and fueled by paranoia and mistrust of the outside world. It's a strong opening for the story; the characters barely have to utter a word, and yet we understand the nature of their lives and its horrors with their actions, as the grim tone created by the opening sets in.
The film also takes the time to examine Travis' dreams, watching his psyche shift in the wake of his grandfather's death. At first, these dream sequences are a good way to consider what Travis is going through, but as the film goes on the repeated use becomes much less effective, especially as they become more obviously dreamlike while the film still tries to create tension with them. It's hard to feel any sort of fear when you know what you're watching is just a reflection of a person's mind and not actually happening.
Things change when another man Will (Abbott) breaks in to their home and is captured. Claiming to have a wife and son, he's tentatively released and takes Paul to retrieve them and supplies. Bringing Will, his wife Kim (Riley Reough) and son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner) in to their home, the six of them work together, in a tenuous relationship that's at first relaxed, but builds in tension over time as everyone tries to be rational, but becomes inevitably suspicious of one another.
The attempt at a grey approach to the situation is what I liked most about the film. The perceptions of the characters are limited and designed to create doubt, while the audience is given enough pieces to draw their own conclusions, but also given a reason to believe each side. While the film's bias is unavoidably slanted in the direction of the first family we meet, the characters behave rationally enough with the information they have at their disposal that even when things gets crazy, it's not hard to see why. A misspoken word, an unknown quantity, bit by bit the reasons for each side of the family to question the other are not unreasonable. We see things primarily from the perspective of the first family, so we understand their suspicions and their actions. However, we're given just enough from the other side to not be quite as suspicious as the characters. It's a difficult thing to work with, trying to convey the tension and paranoia of the characters, while giving the audience some but not all of that same feeling, and the film pulls off this effort to keep the world grey very well. Every person's actions are believable, and you can see why they would seem justified from their perspective. That said, the film's constant ambiguity becomes frustrating towards the film's end; as the story resolves, I can understand not giving the characters real closure, but something for the audience to chew on after would've left me with more of an impact.
The Verdict: It Comes at Night is a good exercise in tension and paranoia, with an effective grim tone and interesting grey morality. It's an occasionally gut-wrenching slow burn, but its use of dream sequences and general ambiguity gets repetitive after a while.
Rating: 7/10
Published Monday, July 10th, 2017
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