It Comes at Night (2017)

Directed by: Trey Edward Shults | 88 minutes | drama, thriller, horror | Actors: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Griffin Robert Faulkner, David Pendleton, Chase Joliet, Mick O’Rourke, Mikey

‘It Comes at Night’ is a psychological thriller with some horror elements. Let that sink in, because the marketing for the film suggests otherwise. Horror fans who expect a movie for gore, monsters and jumpscares would do well to adjust their expectations.

A wooden house in a forest, in an unnamed country. Someone is seriously ill, the lumps on his body betray a mysterious illness. His family wears gas masks, there is plastic on the windows and doors. Is that to keep the disease out or to protect the outside world? ‘It Comes at Night’ takes a long time to interpret the images; you know what you see, but there are several motives for it.

That keeps the tension going for quite some time. The family in question seems likeable, even if they do terrible things to survive, but it can also go the other way. The arrival of a burglar shakes things up. What is his intention? Is this Will (Christopher Abbott) really someone who is in much the same situation as Paul (Joel Edgerton), his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their nearly grown son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.)? Even after meeting his young wife Kim (Riley Keough) and adorable son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), you may still question his honesty.

The absence of context is a strong point in the screenplay. You can only guess at the cause of this suffering. There’s some kind of virus going on, but whether this is global or just regional, how long the family has been incarcerated and why exactly there… It’s a good move by director Trey Edward Schults (who also wrote the screenplay) to give the viewer a brief overview to provide information. It helps a lot to build up the tension.

What also works, of course, is the strong acting. ‘It Comes at Night’ thrives on the characters and the feelings they encounter: fear, mistrust, paranoia. The cast, especially Harrison Jr., do a great job of evoking the viewer’s sense that the evil they are fighting may not be an external but an internal factor.