It Comes at Night (2017)
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son, but this will soon be put to test when a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.
24 connections found
View:
24 films that influenced It Comes at Night
What critics say influenced It Comes at Night
Like It Follows (2014) and last year’s The Witch, it probably won’t be to every horror fan’s taste—it’s a stylish, masterfully wrenching plunge into dire circumstances that turn human drama into horror and bring out the monstrosities of survival.
Like The Witch , It Comes at Night is an object lesson in how to stylize asceticism.
In its chills-over-scares approach, it’s reminiscent of fellow A24 release The Witch, though it’s even more vague in its storytelling then that already dreamy, atmosphere-heavy film.
The picture is part of the new breed of horror films that has emerged from the shadows in recent years, chilly little burnt offerings like The Babadook, The Witch and It Follows.
It’s an appropriate new entry in the ever-expanding roster of producer and distributor A24, which also handled horror breakout “The Witch,” another effective dose of minimalist horror told in the confines of an eerie, isolated forest.
Horror fans frequently debate whether the horror films distributed by A24 — which include The Witch, Green Room, and Under the Skin — are made for mainstream moviegoers or for a more esoteric, indie film–loving set .
It Comes at Night, on the other hand, can’t help but veer into thematic territory that’s been explored ad nauseum in everything from Night of Living Dead and The Road to The Stand and The Walking Dead.
Paul, a quiet man belying his short fuse, preaches the priorities of family, but his paranoia speaks for itself: Travis is everything that matters to his parents, and, like the son in The Road, he represents all that’s worth preserving after the world ends.
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.”
It Comes at Night is a movie for those who found The Road excessively sentimental.
And while neither are what I would call narratively surreal, It Comes at Night does, spookily, administer a desolate like atmosphere, reminiscent of David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
Sharing more similarities with 2015's quiet apocalyptic indie " Z for Zachariah " than the film its teaser trailer and promotional materials most resemble, 2004's M. Night Shyamalan thriller " The Village ," the film certainly conjures an unsettling aura but does so at a deliberate tempo where its characters' emotional journey and insular world takes precedence over predictable genre tactics.
The film’s nearest analogue is probably Craig Zobel’s underlooked 2015 thriller , Z for Zachariah, though that film—troubled with unease as it is—looks downright gentle compared to Shults’s harrowing chamber piece.
Psychological trauma isn’t exactly untrammelled territory as far as dystopias are concerned, with “The Walking Dead,” Z for Zachariah, Snowpiercer and the Hunger Games movies all touching on that subject to varying degrees just within the last several years.
From “Z for Zachariah” to “The Survivalist,” minimalist post-apocalyptic survival stories have repeatedly gone underseen, in part because they don’t entirely fulfill the potential of their central conceit.
While “It Comes at Night” bears similarities to such recent films as “10 Cloverfield Lane” and the little-seen post-apocalyptic drama “Z for Zachariah” — all are about strangers in close quarters after the social fabric has been ripped to shreds — “Night” lacks the fantastical elements of the former and is more tensely terrifying than the latter.
Advertisement
Sharing more similarities with 2015's quiet apocalyptic indie " Z for Zachariah " than the film its teaser trailer and promotional materials most resemble, 2004's M. Night Shyamalan thriller " The Village ," the film certainly conjures an unsettling aura but does so at a deliberate tempo where its characters' emotional journey and insular world takes precedence over predictable genre tactics.
Funny how, in spite of how fresh the movie feels throughout, I still kept expecting the plot to lead to a paltry, Shyamalan-esque climax akin to The Village .
That’s the widdershins message of Krisha director Shults’ sophomore feature, a severely downbeat, cabin-in-the-woods horror show that entwines the claustrophobic paranoia of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead with the locked-door tension of Roger Corman’s Day the World Ended and a febrile case of Cabin Fever to boot.
Scarefests from Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead have covered this territory, but not like Shults does.
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.
The stark, somber story bears echoes of everything from Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” to George Romero’s splatterific zombie epics (“Night of the Living Dead” looms particularly large here), but what sets “It Comes at Night” apart from those post-apocalyptic forebears is its radical narrative economy.
It’s boarded up as tight as the home in “Night of the Living Dead” — or, one hopes, more so — and the family has a strict regimen to get through the day.
There are no news broadcasts to tell us and the isolated rural characters about the unfolding global threat as there were in "Signs" and "Night of the Living Dead."
Shults’ camera navigates them with the slow, deliberate pace of Lost Highway-era Lynch , and often pauses to ponder what could lie beyond a dark doorway or a ridge at twilight.
Advertisement
The film uses the pitch black of night, lit by flashlights (no cheating!), and does so with a nightmare finesse that’s reminiscent, at times, of “The Blair Witch Project.”
“The Andromeda Strain” concentrated on scientific plausibility; “Children of Men” struck notes of despair and near-religious salvation; a zombie flick is mostly interested in the gory results of infection.
It Comes at Night doesn’t have a particularly meaty narrative; this isn’t a thoughtful dystopian film in the vein of Children of Men, a terrifying and gross zombie flick like 28 Days Later, or even the twisty, surprisingly good 10 Cloverfield Lane.