Movie review: Horror film ‘It Comes At Night’ plays on ordinary fears – Madison.com

Among the many unanswered questions left by the horror film It Comes At Night is what exactly the "it" in the title refers to. Viewers might have different interpretations. But the film isn't really about an "it," the outside threat that's coming for us. It's about our own fear in the face of such a threat, and the terrible lengths that such fear might push us.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) drops us into the film with very little information about what's going on. We know theres a family in a barricaded house somewhere deep in the forest. We know that theres some sort of plague ravaging the world, so bad that, in the opening scene, we see a man (Joel Edgerton) carry his infected father-in-law out into the woods, shoot him and burn the body.

Left behind in the house are Edgerton's character, a history teacher named Paul, his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.). They dont know anything about what's happening in the outside world they just stay safe locked inside the house.

Until one night, when another man, Will (Christopher Abbott) breaks into the house. Paul almost kills Will, then leaves him tied to a tree for a day to make sure he isnt infected. Then he hears his story Will is a father, too, with a wife, Kim (Riley Keough) and young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner) hiding in an abandoned house a few miles away, low on water.

Begrudgingly, Paul agrees to bring the new family inside the house. A tentative truce between the two fathers is reached, and then something approaching friendship. Theres a flicker of hope in both families that, together, they might rebuild a life that approaches normal.

But then, of course, things go bad. Travis dog goes missing, setting in motion a terrible chain of events that causes escalating misunderstanding and mistrust between the two families. The scary thing is that every step down into paranoia feels understandable on both sides. Wed like to think we would be better people in the same situation, but with the survival of our families at stake? Maybe not.

Shults first movie was the ultra-low-budget Krisha, a lacerating family drama he shot in his parents home using several relatives as cast members. In retrospect, that film was a training ground for the horror techniques hes refined here the mounting tension, the limited perspective of the main character, the camera gliding ominously through hallways and down stairs.

In It Comes At Night, those hallways are almost entirely, unnervingly dark, with perhaps a lanterns glow filling up one corner of the screen. There are a few jump scares in the film (unfortunately, too many of them are the familiar It was only a dream! kind), but its the pervasive sense of dread that really lingers.

If It Comes At Night is more of a straight-up horror movie, its one that intimately understands family dynamics. In particular, we see the father's need to protect his child striking sparks against the childs need to rebel. Shults has said that like his mother inspired Krisha, his late father inspired Night. There are numerous father-son relationships throughout the film, not only Paul and Travis and Will and Andrew, but Paul and the father-in-law he had to kill, and in some ways, between Paul and Will. Even a pair of looters that try to ambush Paul and Will are an older man and a younger man, and I think were meant to infer that theyre father and son, even though Shults doesnt tell us so.

Shults leaves some events in the film like the question of who left a door open at a key moment unresolved. These big, dark gaps in the film, like the darkness around that small lanterns glow, invite us to project our worst fears into them.

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Movie review: Horror film 'It Comes At Night' plays on ordinary fears - Madison.com