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A family living in a woodland cabin following the spread of an apocalyptic virus must deal with the appearance of a desperate stranger.
Does a film become more or less scary when you go in expecting it to be a horror film? Is one well-deployed jump-scare really enough to maintain a feature-length sense of unease? At what point does nothing-is-scarier just become a whole lot of nothing? I can't really treat It Comes at Night as a straight horror and I get the impression that, barring a sudden musical sting here or a graphic display of illness there, it really isn't trying too hard to be one. It treads familiar ground with its loosely-defined post-apocalyptic premise where survivors take whatever means necessary to survive in the face of an infection that has driven them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. It's that sense of isolation that gnaws away even as the fear of both infection and invasion ebb and flow across the film's running time - even the sudden arrival of friendly strangers does little (if anything) to ease that psychological distress for long.
The approach that It Comes at Night takes to being both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a psychological drama has its strengths and weaknesses. There's a messiness to the way that different threads of plot and character development are frequently raised but only occasionally elaborated upon that can seem less deliberately ambiguous than frustratingly vague. At least any looseness to the narrative is compensated for by the perpetuation of a constantly foreboding atmosphere, especially on the part of the sufficiently capable cast. As it stands, It Comes at Night manages to build an effective enough mix of existential dread and visceral fear off the back of a simplistic story. This isn't enough to make it an instant classic or completely keep it from resorting to conventional horror tactics, but that doesn't stop it from resonating either.
IT COMES AT NIGHT
Trey Edward Shults, 2017
Trey Edward Shults, 2017
A family living in a woodland cabin following the spread of an apocalyptic virus must deal with the appearance of a desperate stranger.
Does a film become more or less scary when you go in expecting it to be a horror film? Is one well-deployed jump-scare really enough to maintain a feature-length sense of unease? At what point does nothing-is-scarier just become a whole lot of nothing? I can't really treat It Comes at Night as a straight horror and I get the impression that, barring a sudden musical sting here or a graphic display of illness there, it really isn't trying too hard to be one. It treads familiar ground with its loosely-defined post-apocalyptic premise where survivors take whatever means necessary to survive in the face of an infection that has driven them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. It's that sense of isolation that gnaws away even as the fear of both infection and invasion ebb and flow across the film's running time - even the sudden arrival of friendly strangers does little (if anything) to ease that psychological distress for long.
The approach that It Comes at Night takes to being both a post-apocalyptic thriller and a psychological drama has its strengths and weaknesses. There's a messiness to the way that different threads of plot and character development are frequently raised but only occasionally elaborated upon that can seem less deliberately ambiguous than frustratingly vague. At least any looseness to the narrative is compensated for by the perpetuation of a constantly foreboding atmosphere, especially on the part of the sufficiently capable cast. As it stands, It Comes at Night manages to build an effective enough mix of existential dread and visceral fear off the back of a simplistic story. This isn't enough to make it an instant classic or completely keep it from resorting to conventional horror tactics, but that doesn't stop it from resonating either.