[rating=10.00]
In the opening moments of It Comes At Night, the second feature film from writer/director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha), it’s made clear that the stakes of this story are very high. Set in a boarded up house surrounded by wilderness amidst the fallout of an unseen apocalypse, every decision has a domino effect on the life or death of every other character.
We might not know exactly what lead us to this world, but under no uncertain terms do we know what it means to survive it.
Like his first film, Shults has built a narrative almost entirely out of dialogue and subtext, a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere that puts you — and keeps you — at the edge of your seat. Not for an abundance of jump-scares, but a creeping, deep-seated sense of dread over what will happen next. Or in some cases, what doesn’t happen.
While Krisha was set in a single home with a large family that had gathered together to celebrate Thanksgiving, It Comes At Night takes the family dynamic and puts it through an end-of-the-world lens, questioning every character’s humanity while putting it at odds with what they’d be willing to do to survive it.
The story focuses on Paul (Joel Edgerton), the patriarch of a small family who’s managed to carve out a semi-livable existence deep in the woods. One night, their home is breached by Will (Christopher Abbott), a fellow survivor who’s desperate for supplies. After Paul puts Will through an extreme vetting process, he reluctantly agrees to bring him and his wife and young child into their home.
What may seem like a thoughtful survival gamut that may even help slowly rebuild a small cornerstone of civilization, Paul lets it known to his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) that this may be a temporary measure, and that they can only rely on one-another as family.
Though the film consciously chooses to skip over the details as to what caused this new world, it dives deep into the nature of trust, as well as the reality that there are much, much worse things than death at the world’s end.
