It Comes at Night review – fiercely watchable post-apocalyptic chiller | Film
The 28-year-old Texan film-maker Trey Edwards Shults is a former crew member on Terrence Malick movies who made a big impression last year with his no-budget debut feature at SXSW, Krisha, about an eccentric older woman showing up at a family reunion party. For his follow-up he has put together this very impressive movie whose title, It Comes at Night, might suggest straight horror. But, that isn’t really the case and the title doesn’t entirely mesh with what happens in the film.
Actually, what you get is a claustrophobic psychological chiller in the more realist post-apocalyptic vein, set in a lonely world where law and order and human decencies have broken down due to some unspecified plague, which is liable to surface again if brutal quarantine discipline is relaxed for a single moment. Those who have been spared the great horror that has swept civilisation away must get by with their families as best they can â€" barricaded by their own anxiety, deeply and even murderously suspicious of strangers.
It is a downbeat cousin to 28 Days Later or The Road, but perhaps more like Stephen Fingleton’s recent Northern Irish movie The Survivalist or Michael Haneke’s uncompromisingly bleak The Time of the Wolf. Joel Edgerton plays Paul, the bearded and grim-faced patriarch of a family who are holed up in a fortified home in a forest somewhere in North America. He lives with his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and teen son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr). The film begins with an intimately horrible scene: Sarah’s elderly dad Bud (David Pendleton) has just succumbed to the illness, with ugly spores all over his body, and the two other men put on masks and gloves to take his body out to the surrounding woodland to be burned.
As if this wasn’t traumatic enough, an intruder arrives: Will (Christopher Abbott) who says that he only wants water for his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and their child. This desperate man seems plausible enough â€" Paul can sympathise and sees a way to feel human again, a redemption, after their devastating bereavement.
However, Paul starts to notice tiny inconsistencies in Will’s story. Paul is scared of interaction, causing situations that spread and replicate, like the disease: he is frightened of his family being infected by alien relationships over which he has no control. Even when he is happy enough with Will and his family, it is clear that Paul still cannot quite rid himself of the notion that they, however healthy, could be the disease. Will and Kim’s child has a habit of sleepwalking, which creates its own miasma of anxiety and Travis seems to have some sort of growing friendship with Kim.
Everything about the atmosphere in It Comes at Night is tense, and the tension comes both from within and without â€" human betrayal and airborne sickness. At its most effective, it achieves a combination I associate with British television post-apocalyptic drama from the 70s and 80s, like Survivors or Threads: scary-plus-depressing. The immediate menace is flavoured with a grimmer, longer-term sense that, however the present danger pans out, this is what life is going to be like from now on.
In a rare moment of candour, Paul says that before the great catastrophe, he was a teacher â€" his speciality being Roman history. It is an elegant moment of irony. The civilisation that they enjoyed, until only a few years or months before, has now vanished into exactly that same distant irrelevance as classical antiquity.
It Comes at Night is a drama that doesn’t feel the need to tie up loose ends or deliver neat twists or pat explanations. It mirrors what life would be like for survivors and their attitude to strangers or even friends whose motivations can’t truly be known. These are people who might have to lie, to cheat, to betray even those they like, who under other circumstances they would feel a debt of gratitude towards â€" but this is what is needed to live and the old rules have been superseded. It is a fiercely watchable film.
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