It Comes at Night (2017)
Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you go in and rob the house.
— T.S. Eliot
A surefire way to jinx yourself before seeing a movie is deciding on the drive to the theater, “There’s no possible way I’m not going to love this.” In my case, this is something I said out loud with all the certainty in the world and a bunch of proof to back up my — albeit, high — expectations. Exhibit A: Critics have been fervently anticipating Trey Edward Shults’ second feature since his inventive debut, Krisha, which made several top 10 best-of-the-year lists in 2016. When it finally released, the outpouring of collective critical acclaim and positive reactions to It Comes at Night overflowed my Film Twitter feed day after day, particularly in the past few weeks. So yeah, safe to assume it’d be stellar, yes? Exhibit B: Joel Edgerton’s the main character, and he rocks. Exhibit C: I’m a big fan of the genre in general, especially thrillers that get under your skin that combine good storytelling with excellence and precision. All that to say: I *very much* wanted to like this movie.
It Comes at Night opens in disorienting, compelling fashion and drops you into the narrative like suddenly waking from a bad dream. Where are these people? How did they get there? For how long have they been there? But Shults is not interested in answering your petty what-on-earth-is-going-on questions. Like Shane Carruth with Primer and David Lynch with everything, this director isn’t here to tell you a tidy bedtime story with an ending that makes traditional sense. Instead, there’s a deceptively straightforward plot about some people we don’t know at an unidentified place in an unspecified time, and as we struggle to name what’s waiting just behind the corner, the real meaning eludes us. Trey Edward Shults gives the audience a bare-boned story while he goes in and robs the house — trading clarity for ambiguity, leaving us either furious or curious, depending on your natural sentiment for such things.
Yet despite that frustrating paradigm, all the ingredients of a great film are in this one. Solid performances, intricate cinematography, good direction, original script, etc., etc. It Comes at Night checks all those boxes with gusto. But there’s a constant, subtle lack of regard I felt along the way for us as viewers and as people who showed up expecting a horror film (and, quite frankly, for something to come at night) with his decision to give us such a polarizing finale. Thus, ultimately, the quality of the experience comes down to your preference for transparency or closure and whether those factors are necessary for it to feel worthwhile. For me, such loose ends are incomplete and incite either regret or anger or both. But I tried. I tried to pay close attention to clues. I tried to solve what began as a fascinating mystery only to discover (abruptly) in the final moments that …
Well. You’ll see.
