It Comes at Night: Death is isolating and inevitable.
The one thing you can expect to learn from this film is that death comes to us all. The real artistry here is in the refusal of the director to provide any real relief or answers.
Joel Edgerton is beautiful, as usual. Chris Abbott, same goes. But, this movie was really about Travis all along, played by new kid Kelvin Harrison Jr. The viewer can relate most to Travis’s confusion and voyeurism, curious about his parents and the newcomers in their lonely house, while also not realizing he’s slowly losing himself, burdened by insomnia and something deeper.
Trey Edward Shults wrote this film after his father passed away from cancer. One can’t help but notice the large-scale metaphor for this disease and the way it creeps, surrounds, and kills.
It’s a post-apocalyptic setting, scattered survivors are beset by some mysterious plague that leads victims to a gruesome end, black bile rising and spilling out of them, poison on the inside. This could easily have turned into a zombie movie, but Shults didn’t do the typical blockbuster horror thing. He doesn’t rely on jump scares or literal monsters. The fear is really in the suspense and anxiety, sustained whole way through and slowly growing, right up to the credits. Travis’s visions of that mysterious bloody bile get more frightening every time he closes his eyes.
The two families, grappling with brutal mortality and morality, closed themselves inside this house with “only one way in and out”, a red door — symbolic of death’s door. Death is circling, slowly seeping in, trapping them in closer and closer — confined first to the forest, then the house, then only the bedrooms. The film, as death does, introduces many uncertainties and then simply ignores the questions of the audience, not bothering to establish the true sequence of events, narrating unreliably until a certain end.
Shults created a mood — cold dread — and didn’t let up, using the camera to create tension. Slow zooms, uncomfortably tight shots, creeping pans, and dreamlike crossfades added to Travis’s nightmares. Lighting was half of the horror in this film, filled with shots that reminded me of chiaroscuro paintings. All to settle the audience into a sticky fear of some unknowable threat.
One of my favorite scenes is the conversation at the dinner table between the two families. Travis is more open and naive, speaking sweetly. This contrasts uncomfortably with Paul’s “desperate times, desperate measures” mentality. He is already isolated from his parents, in the way he thinks, when all of them are already isolated from the rest of the world. The paranoia, mistrust, and desperation in the face of death all grow and slowly poison the characters, in that cabin that became a tiny trap they set for themselves.
Best enjoyed alone and cold.
