It Comes at Night

The most strik­ing aspect of It Comes at Night, direc­tor Trey Edward Shults’ sec­ond fea­ture, is how it seeks to avoid gener­ic con­ven­tion and cliché. While retain­ing the nar­ra­tive skele­ton of a tra­di­tion­al con­ta­gion hor­ror with a whiff of the sur­vival­ist thriller, the film departs from its gener­ic roots by keep­ing the nature of the ill­ness, its means of infec­tion and its ori­gin unknown to the view­er. Although they live in a seclud­ed house in the mid­dle of a for­est, the char­ac­ters def­i­nite­ly know more than we do – in a depar­ture from broad hor­ror con­ven­tion, it is with our igno­rance the film toys with, not the characters’.

The film opens with Paul (Joel Edger­ton), the aus­tere patri­arch of the fam­i­ly, exe­cut­ing a man cov­ered with pus­tules before set­ting fire to the body. The con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed per­son, we dis­cov­er, was the father to his wife Sarah (Car­men Ejo­go) and grand­fa­ther to his son Travis (Kelvin Har­ri­son Jr), a tall and skin­ny boy in his teens. This blunt, hor­rif­ic open­ing imme­di­ate­ly inspires dread, hint­ing at the hor­ri­ble things these char­ac­ters must have wit­nessed in order to be able to kill a loved rel­a­tive with such ease.

The sequence is pur­pose­ful­ly alien­at­ing. Thrown into this unknown sit­u­a­tion, the vio­lence is stun­ning. This lev­el of dread becomes a con­stant through­out a film which boasts with a supreme­ly unset­tling visu­al style, all oppres­sive track­ing shots and odd­ly still cam­era pans. The clin­i­cal, cold look at a home­ly rur­al envi­ron­ment gives the strong impres­sion that, con­trary to appear­ances, no one here is safe.

Mak­ing the famil­iar seem unfa­mil­iar already hints at the idea that, although no one inside the house is ill, some­thing there is already bro­ken. Con­stant­ly scared and always aware of the prox­im­i­ty of death, the res­i­dents have lost all sense of famil­iar­i­ty with their sur­round­ings and the peo­ple around them. Worst off is Travis, who is bare­ly aware of what is going on, escap­ing into dreams at night and more con­cerned about his dog than he is about his own safe­ty. He is the main char­ac­ter, and it is unde­ni­ably his fear and con­fu­sion that the audi­ence expe­ri­ences through­out the film.

Yet what dri­ves the sto­ry for­ward is Paul, who fights this apa­thy by hold­ing on to the notion of fam­i­ly. His obses­sion becomes a cen­tral theme of the film after the fam­i­ly meets Will (Christo­pher Abbott), a man who breaks into their house look­ing for food for his wife (Riley Keough) and young son. The two fam­i­lies move in togeth­er, shar­ing sup­plies and com­pa­ny, but the alliance proves frag­ile as Paul’s para­noia and con­cern with keep­ing his own loved ones safe threat­en to descend into vio­lence at any moment.

This is all ter­ri­bly sad, even more so con­sid­er­ing Travis is only col­lat­er­al dam­age, embarked into this rival­ry against his will. But some­thing is off. The sad­ness and ter­ror that the film wants us to feel sim­ply aren’t there. We can only watch and admire the ideas and visu­al inven­tion on dis­play, sym­pa­this­ing with the char­ac­ters with­out ever tru­ly feel­ing their pain.

It would be easy to say that this impos­si­bil­i­ty to relate is inten­tion­al, since we are meant to iden­ti­fy with the alien­at­ed Travis. But the film would prob­a­bly not devote this much screen time to close ups on facial expres­sions if it did not want us to empathise with the char­ac­ters to some degree. Unfor­tu­nate­ly this obser­va­tion­al, ​‘real­is­tic’ visu­al style is not a short­cut to char­ac­ter building.

On the con­trary – hav­ing char­ac­ters’ inte­ri­or­i­ty shown at a sur­face lev­el, through close-ups but also via abrupt, rather unnat­ur­al and jar­ring speechi­fy­ing from the char­ac­ters them­selves, makes them appear unre­al­is­ti­cal­ly one-sided and overde­ter­mined. These char­ac­ters are com­plete­ly lim­it­ed to what we see and what they say. As in soap operas, we can sym­pa­thise with their emo­tions and trou­bles, but their overt­ness makes it hard to buy them as real people.

This demon­stra­tive style is all the more con­fus­ing for the way it con­trasts with the unex­plained dread that the film goes to great lengths to cre­ate. All through­out the sto­ry, this grip­ping fear with­in every sin­gle image car­ries the promise that some­thing hor­ri­ble – some­thing more – is lurk­ing around every cor­ner and will per­haps come out at the end in a big reveal. But it nev­er does, and the film falls short.

Because the expert­ly craft­ed atmos­phere is not backed up by sto­ry or nar­ra­tive devel­op­ment, the film ulti­mate­ly feels more like an exer­cise in (very good) style than a ful­ly realised film. Laud­able sto­ry and themes are enun­ci­at­ed as marks of intent, rather than tru­ly felt and explored. As such, watch­ing It Comes at Night often feels less like expe­ri­enc­ing a film than it does observ­ing a direc­tor con­struct one.