No, this isn’t porn. I’m not really sure what to call this. It Comes at Night was marketed as a horror film and seemed to be about people living in a house in the woods with some sort of monster outside. That was a pack of damn dirty lies. This isn’t a horror film and there is no monster. Instead we have a family living in the woods after a virus has apparently wiped out most of the population and they must deal with growing paranoia when another family shows up asking for help. I guess you could call it a thriller, or just a drama. But one thing is certain: It is boring as all hell.
There are good things about this film. The cinematography is gorgeous. The framing, lighting and tracking shots are the kind of stuff that should be shown to film students to develop technique. Kudos to young director Trey Edward Shults for his technical skills. The performances are all excellent as well. Joel Edgerton has become one of my favorite actors lately and the rest of the cast (filled with unknowns that I didn’t recognize) are great as well. This movie is more of a character study than anything else, and all actors create characters that are both sympathetic and highly suspect at the same time. That is a difficult mixture to pull off and the cast also deserves kudos.
But if you aren’t looking to study camera techniques or acting, you are shit out of luck because nothing happens in this movie. I usually devote a paragraph to plot discussion, but I think that one previous sentence will suffice in this instance. I’m all for leaving some things vague. I saw this with a few friends and I seemed to be the only one who didn’t care about how the virus got started. But you have to give me something, movie. We know nothing about the virus or where these people are coming from or really even why they are afraid to go out at night. Entire sequences and plot points are left unexplained or are just abandoned completely. The driving force in the narrative is paranoia, but there is no real conflict until the very end, nor is there even an antagonist. Someone could argue that the villain is the distrustful nature of humanity, which is sufficiently pretentious. But you know what would be a more entertaining villain? Fucking anything. I had no sense of the structure of this film and couldn’t tell when it was nearing the conclusion because it doesn’t build toward anything. It’s like watching post-apocalyptic home movies from some family that probably wasn’t that fucking interesting before the world ended.
I wouldn’t have recommended this movie regardless, but the marketing really screwed this film. Maybe if I went into it expecting a character-driven drama, I would have been less irritated while watching it. But if you sell me a horror movie, you had better give me a goddamn horror movie. This is like Cabin Fever if you took out the gore and wackiness and infused it with the coma-inducing dullness of The Witch but left out the actual witch. The result is the kind of thing that douchey art-house critics will love, but general audiences will hate.
And I still don’t know what comes at night.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Comes_at_Night#/media/File:It_Comes_at_Night.png
