'It Comes At Night' - Review Thread

It Comes at Night(6/18/2017)

 The main media story surrounding the new movie It Comes At Night has not been related to its themes or technique so much as the divide it’s caused between critics and audiences, who are divided as to its worth. This divide has been quantified in two separate metrics: its 86% score on the review aggregator site RottenTomatoes and the score of “D” that it reportedly got from the audience poll called CinemaScore. For those who don’t know, CenemaScore is a poll conducted by a professional firm which asks audiences at certain demographically selected public screenings during the opening weekend for films in order to report audience reaction back to studios. Now, if you’re a moneyman I can see why such a poll would be useful, but anyone else should take these scores with a strong grain of salt as they by their nature accept the input of the uninformed amateur rather than the input of people with any actual expertise about what they’re talking about. RottenTomatoes has its own problems but it’s certainly a more valuable resource in much the way the opinion of an actual scientist would be more useful in forming climate change policy than the opinion of a Gallup poll of the general public. Another problem with CinemaScore is that it is heavily influenced by audience expectations and tends to especially punish movies that offer audiences movies that are perhaps a bit more challenging and unique than what their advertising initially leads them to expect. Personally, I’ve always been an advocate of seeing movies with as few expectations as possible and with It Comes At Night I lived up to that more than on most movies. I don’t remember ever seeing a trailer for it and outside of hearing some of the “critics vs. audiences” story in the ether didn’t really know much about it at all before giving it a look.

 As it turns out, the film is set in some not too distant future after some apocalyptic virus has killed a large portion of the population. At the film’s center is a nuclear family that’s been living in a boarded up and fortified house consisting of a father named Paul (Joel Edgerton), a wife named Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and a son named Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and until recently they’d also been living with Sarah’s father Bud (David Pendleton) but as the film begins he has somehow contracted the virus and is put out of his misery before he can spread the virus and take on whatever awful side effects it brings with it. Throughout its run time the film is always vague about exactly what the nature of the virus is and there’s also some suggestion that there’s some separate element to it, some supernatural force that exists outside of the house which has some relation to the virus that’s never really explained. The main action of the film begins when someone attempts to enter the family’s house one night and is quickly subdued and captured by the family. Upon interrogation its learned that this man is named Will (Christopher Abbott) and that he was only going through the house because he thought it was abandoned and he’s looking for clean water to bring to his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and meant no harm. Paul and Sarah are not sure whether to trust him but they see some opportunity in working with these other people so Paul embarks on a trip to investigate these other people.

 It Comes at Night is ostensibly a horror movie and does play with the tropes of that genre at time, but it is perhaps more accurate to view it as a sort of procedural about post-apocalyptic survival. There’s been a lot of pop culture recently about fathers going on road trips with their kids across the American landscape after similar cataclysms, which tends to allow the audience to both experience the drama of a survival scenario and also get a glimpse at what the ravaged landscape looks like with civilization collapsed. It Comes at Night shows a similar scenario except that the parents here have opted for more of a “hunker down” rather than “stay mobile” approach to survival. In those road trip movies the challenges usually come in the form of chance encounters at every given bend, and there’s a little bit of that here, but the bigger threats are more internal and rooted in the family’s own paranoia. In this sense the film is perhaps analogous to another recent indie-horror classic The Witch, which also focused on a family removed from society and seemingly being torn apart by an outside force sowing seeds of suspicion and doubt among everyone involved.

 The film was directed by a guy named Trey Edward Shults, a young director who made his feature debut last year with a micro-budget independent film called Krisha about a family reunion that goes very poorly. I wasn’t that movie’s biggest fan but I could see that there was a pretty thoughtful and interesting director behind it and was interested to see what he’d be able to do with a slightly larger budget. With It Comes at Night Shults has realized a lot of that potential. The film does a great job of establishing some of the minutia of what life in this house compound and how the family has managed to make something of a workable life for themselves in all the chaos while also underscoring the dangers their constantly facing. The movie also makes a very good use of mystery and is very wise to never really come out and explain whether there’s an outside force at work here aside from the virus and the human scavengers who may be outside and its refusal to define this force helps to add a lot of tension to the film. As the movie goes on and becomes more and more a film about paranoia and the psychological tension between the characters Shults does a good job of utilizing the layout of this house and makes it feel less and less like a cozy bunker and more like a prison where violence is about to break out.

 The film is not completely without its faults of course. I probably could have done without the games that Shults occasionally plays with the film’s aspect ratio and while I liked the film’s somewhat abrupt ending in principle I can see why some people wouldn’t like it and feel like there could have been ways to punch it up just a little. And that I suppose brings be back to those audience members whose input led the film to receive that “D” CinemaScore. In many ways I feel like that score has less to do with the actual movie and more to do with the audience members’ expectations and how they were set partly by the film’s marketing (which is maybe a little misleading but not egregiously so) but in a bigger way were set by the wider modern horror landscape and their inability to see beyond it. I went into the movie with expectations of my own, which were mostly formed by hearing these stories of a critical/audience divide and was in many ways expecting something even more avant-garde than what I got. The movie is in fact, a fairly straightforward exercise from my perspective and it’s only “weird” or “slow” insomuch as it does not play out exactly like a sequel to The Conjuring or Insidious. I can see why people who went to the movie expecting something that played out like a more formulaic Hollywood film might have been a little surprised by it, but I would argue that this is less the fault of the movie and more the fault of their own closedmindedness and we as a film culture should not allow such narrow definitions of what constitutes a horror movie or any other kind of movie to be the only thing audiences are willing to accept.
**** out of Five