In his debut film, “Krisha,” writer-director Trey Edward Shults took a drama about
a fraught Thanksgiving family reunion and ratcheted up the intensity until it
entered the realm of psychological horror. Now in his sophomore outing, the
young filmmaker goes for full-on terror with the nightmarish, post-apocalyptic
thriller “It Comes at Night.” As you might expect, his unique skillset makes
for a fairly seamless transition.
Set in a
near-future where a highly contagious disease appears to have wiped out most of
the population, the film centers on Paul (Joel Edgerton), his wife, Sarah
(Carmen Ejogo), and their teenage son, Travis (Kelvin
Harrison Jr.), who’ve managed to survive on their own — along with their dog,
Stanley — in their boarded-up house in the middle of the woods.
Travis is
still processing the recent loss of his grandfather, who — in the unsettling
sequence that opens the film — we witness Paul shoot in the head, then set the
body aflame after the elderly man shows signs of infection. Shults
doesn’t waste a single moment on exposition about exactly how or why the
sickness spread, and it’s through Travis’s somewhat traumatized eyes that the
story plays out.
After that
incident, the three live in peaceful seclusion for a time, until one night
they’re visited by Will (Christopher Abbott), who breaks in, thinking their
home is abandoned. After subduing the intruder, Paul finds out that Will’s
hunting for supplies to take back to his wife, Kim (Riley Keough),
and young son (Griffin Robert Faulkner), who are waiting for him back in the
empty house they’re currently occupying.
Paul agrees
to accompany Will back to his wife and child and eventually invites them to
join his family in their home. After a quick orientation in which the newbies
are familiarized with the strict rules of the house — including only going out
in pairs and never venturing outside after dark — the two families share
supplies and coexist happily together.
But as
Travis is warned early on by his father, the only thing that he can trust is
family, and soon grief, escalating paranoia, and ever-shifting power dynamics
begin to cast doubts over the other family’s motivations and what they might be
hiding.
Kris
Fenske’s menacing sound design keeps us on edge, while the stunning
cinematography from Drew Daniels calls to mind the original “Blair Witch
Project” in its ability to make night feel like honest-to-God, pitch-black,
terrifying night. With Daniels’ expert work, Shults
demonstrates a remarkable ability to prey on our fears about what danger lies
just beyond our sight.
Sure, there
are some easily-anticipated plot points, but really, there are only so many
ways for survivalist thrillers of this type to play out. The film more than
makes up for any familiarity with an expertly-crafted sense of dread and
perfectly-pitched performances. Through it all, Shults
keeps things grounded in real human emotion: facing the death of a loved one or
the moment when one realizes your parents might not know everything after all.
As in “Krisha,” Shults is
fascinated by the limits of family bonds, probing situations where our familial
connections can either provide the strength to soldier on or bring the entire
world crashing down around us.
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2017.
