It Comes at Night (2017)

In late 2019, a mysterious virus by the name of COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China before quickly making its way across the globe into the United States. On March 12th, 2020, the U.S. government issued a worldwide lockdown, and the world as we knew it radically changed. For the first two weeks, schools were closed, which was no problem for me since, by that point, I had been relieved of the burden of academia for three years. All buildings that didn't serve an essential function (hospitals, grocery stores) were forced to lock up shop. The worst part for me was the closing of restaurants. All my favorite places to eat out on Friday and Saturday nights were now reduced to inferior but better-than-nothing takeout service. And once those two experimental, cautionary weeks had expired, the lockdown would remain in place for approximately the next five months. It wasn't until sometime in August when I noticed the first restaurant to resume indoor dining.

In addition to the mandatory closings, a mask mandate was issued. It was now illegal to walk into a public place without some form of face covering, which was actually a comfort I had warmed up to, particularly in the ice-cold winter. Social gatherings were put on hold, so for that one year, for the first and only time in my life, my parents and I were obligated to celebrate Thanksgiving in the safety and solitude of our own home. Five years later, everything is pretty much back to normal. But the ripple effect of that virus is still glaringly apparent in the prices of everything from groceries to housing to gasoline. 

Four years prior to this outbreak, writer-director Trey Edward Shults began working on a screenplay for his second feature film, inspired by the recent, traumatic death of his father. Intended to help him cope with his grief, Shults envisioned a harrowing story about a post-apocalyptic world torn asunder by a mysterious, quasi-supernatural disease, told from the intimate perspective of a family struggling day and night to survive it. The result is one of the most prescient up-close examinations of a pandemic and the ways in which everyday people respond to one that feels even more relevant in 2025 than when it was released in 2017. Did Shults have a premonition of what was to come?

Although make no mistake, the virus that functions as the titular antagonist of the thoroughly disquieting, savagely sophisticated, brilliantly titled It Comes at Night is far more ruthless, grotesque, and lethal than COVID, which manifested as little more than the common cold, with the admittedly terrifying embellishment of the temporary loss of taste and smell. This is a disease that takes less than one day to infiltrate your body, and once symptoms begin to show, there's only one surefire way to end it to prevent contagion.

At the start of It Comes at Night, the first thing we hear is the heavy, labored breathing of an elderly man named Bud (David Pendleton). Filmed in close-up by cinematographer Drew Daniels, Bud is sitting upright on his bed, looking extremely sick and covered in sores all over his body. He's comforted by the soft, whispery voice of his adult daughter, Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), who tells him it's okay to stop fighting and let go, and that she loves him. Protected by a gas mask and leather gloves, Sarah's husband, Paul (Joel Edgerton), places Bud in a wheel barrow and carries him out into the forest behind their cabin, accompanied by his teenage son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), in place of Sarah, who remains in her bedroom, stifling her tears and holding her breath in dread over what's to come. Paul asks Travis if he has any last words for his grandfather, and he says his goodbye and tells him he loves him. Paul then places a pillow over Bud's face and presses a gun against it. As he pulls the trigger, Daniels cuts to a reaction shot of Travis, who flinches at the bang of the gunshot. Dumping his body in a self-made grave, Paul douses Bud in gasoline, lights a match, and sets fire to his contaminated remains, a cloud of smoke billowing in the air above. Within the first few minutes, commencing with the static opening shot, Shults drops his audience directly in the middle of this godforsaken pandemic with a minimum of dialogue and a complete dearth of exposition, efficiently setting the grim, gut-wrenching tone for the rest of the 91-minute film to follow.

Following this traumatizing occurrence, Paul, Sarah, and Travis try to return to their new normal way of living as a family of three now. While none of them have any idea what exactly is going on (and by extension, neither do we), they've observed enough to live by certain rules to better their chances of avoiding a similar fate to that of Bud. There's a red door at the end of a hallway through which they enter and exit. Once inside or out, the door remains locked, with only two sets of keys worn around the necks of Paul and Sarah at all times. They always go outside in groups of two in the daytime, and as the title warns, they never go out at night unless it's absolutely necessary. In the daytime, they relieve themselves in the toilets in their bathrooms. At night, they use buckets, which they empty out when the sun rises. It's the only way this family has regained some semblance of normalcy in this post-apocalyptic new world, in which they are isolated from almost any remaining trace of fellow human life.

All that changes, for better and worse, one night when the trio is woken from their sleep by the sound of an intruder. Masked, gloved, and most importantly, armed with a rifle with a flashlight attached at the end, Paul shoots the intruder the second he bursts through the red door, revealed to be an adult man. After knocking him unconscious with the butt of the rifle, Paul drags the man outside and, with Travis' help, ties his hands behind a tree and wraps a piece of tape around his mouth, leaving him to spend the rest of the night outside. The next morning, Paul confronts the man, who has come to and is screaming for help, stifled by the tape. His name is Will (Christopher Abbott), and he explains that he was breaking in to attain water and food for his wife and son, who have been staying in an abandoned house nearby since the beginning of the pandemic. Due to the windows being boarded up, Will assumed the house was deserted, insisting he never would've intruded had he known otherwise. He offers to trade his goats, chickens, and some canned food for water.

After discussing their options with Sarah, Paul agrees to retrieve Will's family and allow them to stay inside their home, Sarah arguing that the more people they have with them, the better chance they have at surviving. On their way to Will's family, Paul and Will are ambushed on the road by two armed men. Paul manages to outsmart and kill both of them, but fears that Will may have alerted them, owing to his disapproval of Paul's shooting them dead. Trusting Will when he says he didn't know them and just wanted to get information, Paul brings his wife, Kim (Riley Keough), and their toddler, Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), back to his home. At first, the two families get along and establish a sense of community, exchanging supplies, helping each other board the exterior, chop firewood, and get to know each other. However, when certain stories are contradicted and the threat of contagion resurfaces inside the home, paranoia rears its ugly head and gradually erodes the sense of safety both families have worked hard to engender, reminding them that no one is to be fully trusted.

The most controversial aspect of It Comes at Night is Shults' steadfast and devilishly intelligent refusal to assign a physical form to the "It" of his title. Throughout the entire, taut 91 minutes of this supernatural horror film, the titular source of the virus that has ravaged the world sometime prior to the events depicted is never visibly displayed or aurally explained, its origins left a mystery. We learn about this disease exactly what the characters grappling with it do, which is almost absolutely nothing. That's another parallel this film unintentionally draws to COVID. While theories have emerged over the years, such as the virus having originated in a lab or passed somehow from an animal to a human at a large seafood and live animal market in Wuhan, there never has been, nor will there ever be, a definitive answer as to its origin. And even if there was one, who really would care? What difference would that make, knowing where it came from, who it came from, and how? Everyone who died from it will still be dead. 

Shults makes a very smart choice to adopt that "as is" attitude. He doesn't care who or what created this fast-moving, deadly disease. He's primarily interested in the psychological impact it has on his characters, showing how they react to it, the measures they take to keep themselves alive, and the fear of death it breeds. He wants to keep us in the dark right alongside them, sharing in their uncertainty and paranoia, reminding us of an old but always true adage in horror: what we can't see or understand is infinitely more terrifying. An animal-like creature hiding out in the woods is inherently scary alright, but the real horror is sharing in the effect is has on the protagonists with whom we are expected to empathize. Watching them slowly break down and lose sight of who they are, the fear itself eating away at their deteriorating sanity. While I'm not the first critic to make this assertion, the "It" of the title isn't so much the actual supernatural monster that comes out at night and waits for our heroes to wander outside (truth be told, the culmination of its presence takes place in the early morning), but rather its power to turn good-natured people into ruthless monsters driven by the base desire for survival, both for themselves and their loved ones. 

All we get to see of this disease from a visual standpoint is a series of boils on its victims' skin, from their foreheads to their hands, the retching and vomiting of black blood, and, only in a nightmare sequence, a pair of black, pupil-free eyes. And that's all we need to see to experience the terror felt by these people, and hope against hope they succeed in avoiding it. It's that touch of realism that makes the virus so horrifying. The cause seems to be supernatural in nature, as it comes out at night like a monster from a classic children's bedtime story, but the physical symptoms resemble those of an earthly deadly disease. Who can't relate to waking up in the middle of the night with a virus, drenched in sweat, running to the toilet and puking your guts up? In those moments when you wish for nothing more than to rip off your own skin and run free, would you be comforted to know where you got this virus, from whom you've contracted it, what created it, and what it looks like under a microscope? Hell no! And Shults plays off of that basic logic. 

Less open-minded horror fans may balk at the concept of a movie titled It Comes at Night refusing to show what "It" actually looks like and explaining its origin. Emphasizing character development and interaction and relatable human fears over a ginormous, gooey, CGI monster in a post-apocalyptic horror story? Say what? I may be someone who got their early horror movie education with the slashers of the 70s and 80s, where thematic complexity and three-dimensional characterization often took a backseat to oodles of gratuitous gore and monsters with innovative costumes and fully fleshed out backstories, but fortunately I can still appreciate a well-made exercise in psychological tension that flies in the face of our innate craving for concrete explanations. It Comes at Night is probably the second most harrowing horror film I've ever seen in my 26 years on this planet, after William Friedkin's The Exorcist. A tragic, gut-wrenching psychological study of a family ripped apart by their own fear and paranoia, two emotions we all collectively experience on a practically daily basis. 

It Comes at Night may share the feel of a zombie movie, what with its post-apocalyptic climate, isolated setting, small group of characters, and constant feeling of anxiety, but no such inhuman, bloodthirsty creatures ever materialize. Shults instead uses the threat of an unstoppable, contagious evil to explore potent themes of distrust toward humanity outside of one's own family, how to cope with a world we once recognized coming apart at the seams, keeping your family safe at all costs, and the most powerful and crippling of all: fear of the unknown. 

The protagonists at the center of Shults' screenplay are among the most intellectually nimble, sympathetic, and identifiably human you could hope to engage with in a story like this. You know those horror films where the characters ostensibly trying to survive make the most baffling and inexplicable decisions that ironically put themselves on the receiving end of a pickaxe? Where they wander outside at night when they know they're not supposed to and insist they'll be right back? Or go skinny dipping in a lake while the hockey-masked machete wielder is on the prowl? This is not one of those. These people are intelligent, caring, everyday human beings who are painfully aware of the dire circumstances thrust upon them and are doing everything in their limited mortal power to keep themselves safe from a disease that wants nothing more than to turn them against each other and make them rot from the inside out. 

As the patriarch of his family, Paul is a goodhearted but pragmatic survivalist. Formerly a history teacher, he now assumes the awareness, swiftness, and objectivity of a military trainer every single day in the name of protecting the two people closest to him: Sarah and Travis. If someone becomes sick, Paul acts without a shred of hesitation: he dons his gas mask and protective gloves, retrieves any of the guns or rifles in his arsenal, orders his family to stand back, and does whatever needs to be done to ensure their survival. If he feels someone must be rendered unconscious or outright killed, he doesn't hesitate. No matter how cordial and helpful he may act toward the family he's welcomed into his home, the last thing Paul will ever take is a chance on his own or his loved ones' safety. The second that Travis wakes his parents up one morning to inform them that Andrew may be sick, both Paul and Sarah shoot up out of bed and gather their equipment to confront the family as necessary. When it comes to light that someone has opened the red door in the middle of the night, Paul demands that both families quarantine themselves in their bedrooms for a few days, just in case one of them may have contracted the illness. On the first night of Will's family staying with them, Paul, who always sits at the head of the table to assert his papa bear authority, lays down the few but specific and mandatory rules he and his family abide by to protect themselves. He's exactly the type of man you would want to associate yourself with if a catastrophe of this sort were to ever transpire. He's gregarious and generous, that is until he catches you in a lie or detects even a whiff of betrayal. At that point, Paul is the last person in the world you would want to find yourself sitting across from. 

Prior to seeing him take the lead in It Comes at Night, the first time I had witnessed a performance from Joel Edgerton was as Gordo the Weirdo in the 2015 psychological thriller, The Gift, which he wrote and directed as well. In that movie, Edgerton plays a scrawny, socially awkward, pathetic outcast who ingratiates himself in the lives of a married couple played by Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall, gradually revealing sinister motives beneath his seemingly innocent, "Please be my friend!" exterior. The Joel Edgerton of that movie has transformed into a muscular, no-nonsense beast of a man. His unmistakably masculine appearance, however -- the muscular build and full, dark brown beard -- belies the soft-spoken, fundamentally loving Everyman that lies at the core of Paul's being. 

Beginning with his first difficult decision to end his father-in-law's suffering, Edgerton portrays Paul as a reasonable leader, someone capable of making the toughest decisions no matter how ugly they unavoidably seem. If things are going smoothly, Edgerton shows flashes of the warmth and tenderness that characterized his pre-apocalyptic character. If someone isn't giving the full extent of their intentions or exhibits even the faintest sign of being sick, he taps into the sternness and uncompromising brutality that makes Paul simultaneously protective and intimidating. Even when the fear of contracting the virus eats away at Paul's rationality in the end, Edgerton's masterfully calibrated performance prevents us from viewing him as a monster. His actions may grow monstrous as paranoia reaches a boiling point, but Edgerton refuses to turn Paul into a simple one-dimensional villain. Rather, he's a human man, susceptible to making mistakes, driven by nothing more pure and identifiable as the love for his wife and son. When the family dog, Stanley, is found lying on the floor covered in blood, Travis demands to see him, but Paul gently insists he stay with his mom while he and Will "take care of it." As Travis pushes further, Paul grabs hold of him and sternly implores, "Don't make me the bad guy!" His is a character and performance that evokes Kurt Russell's R.J. MacReady from John Carpenter's sci-fi body horror remake of The Thing. Both actors boast the hairy, masculine appearance, the mix of humanity and hardheadedness, and the natural authority of a leader. Paul may be even more sympathetic because he has a family to protect, as opposed to MacReady's "every man for himself" mindset. In terms of quality of performance, Edgerton is certainly Russell's equal. The expression of guilt emanating from his eyes after he makes a horrifically impulsive decision in the climax demonstrates the true man Paul is at heart.

As Edgerton's better half, Carmen Ejogo is the calmer and more tenderhearted of the couple. The first lines we hear offer insight into Sarah's personality, as she softly whispers to her dad that everything's going to be okay, even as he's clearly nearing his last breath. While Paul is the stereotypical hardheaded patriarch who makes the most difficult choices to protect his family, Sarah is the more compassionate and affectionate mother, embracing Travis as he grieves the loss of his dog and flashing the "take it easy on him" pleading expression to Paul as he screams at their heartbroken son. What makes Sarah a truly captivating character, as opposed to the mere "supportive mom" she could have been, is the stand-by-your-man attitude she takes toward Paul. Rather than quarreling with her husband or questioning his decisions, she smartly adopts his no-nonsense attitude. If informed that someone in the house may be sick, Sarah jumps out of bed and reaches for her protective gear at the precise moment Paul does. While she develops a degree of closeness with Will and Kim once they arrive at their cabin, instantly shaking their hands and welcoming them inside, Sarah never forgets that they're strangers, and everything they've said could easily be a lie. At the point of no return, while aiding her husband in enforcing their authority, Sarah finds herself aiming a rifle at Kim, who's crouched in a corner with her son behind her, begging her to let her family leave. As Ejogo demands that she remain quiet and still, the sadness and horror at her own behavior is reflected behind her bulging eyes and in her tearful delivery, contrasting with the take-no-prisoners exterior she's trying so desperately to project.

Christopher Abbott has possibly the most challenging role of the ensemble. Will is essentially the catalyst for the horrors that unfold. He's not responsible for the disease, of course, but he is the one who breaks into Paul's home in the middle of the night, under the alleged belief that no one was home. During his and Paul's initial conversation, Abbott is entirely convincing in his assertion of innocence, presenting a man not unlike Paul: a husband and father willing to do anything to keep his family alive and healthy. Abbott's greatest strength is playing into the ambiguity of his character, making Will someone who, on the surface, appears trustworthy, good-natured, and driven by the same fundamental needs for food, shelter, and protection as Paul. However, there are hints that Will isn't entirely the innocent, harmless man he projects himself to be. Take the scene where he and Paul are ambushed on the road by the two strange gunmen. After Paul kills the one man, Will is shown beating the other to a pulp. But just before Paul shoots him, Will screams at him not to. After he does so, Will states that he "didn't have to." "Do you know these guys?" Paul asks suspiciously. "What?" Will asks with a touch of ignorance. Is he genuinely confused as to why Paul would ask him that, or does he instantly realize he may have implicated himself? Paul reminds Will that he told him, while he and his family were driving, no one was on the street for the past 50 miles, and yet they barely make it to 10, and here two guys are firing at them. Will gives a credible explanation: they could have talked to the one man and potentially obtained information from him, but now Paul, in his "shoot first, ask later" mentality, has destroyed that opportunity. He reaffirms that he's not lying to him, and the honesty in Abbott's voice instantly earns your alliance. In a later scene, where Paul and Will are getting to know each other while drinking from Bud's stash, Will slips up and refers to himself as an only child. Observantly, Paul makes him repeat that statement before reminding him that, when they first conversed, Will mentioned he was living with a brother who succumbed. Conveying a touch of possible regret, Will asserts that he was referring to his wife's brother, stating that he felt as close to him as a brother. Shults and his actors do an excellent job of garnering a sense of dread through a simple miscommunication. We share in Paul's uncertainty toward Will, and we hold our breaths the second Will refers to himself as an only child. But what reason could Will have had for lying about having a brother? What advantage could he have been hoping to gain? To the bitter, nihilistic end, Shults never reveals if Will has actually been harboring sinister intentions this entire time, and Abbott makes it impossible to draw a conclusion. He makes Will the most fascinatingly enigmatic character of the six (seven if you include Stanley the dog).

The greatest performance in It Comes at Night, however, belongs to 22-year-old Kelvin Harrison Jr. To put it briefly, this kid is a revelation. While Paul may technically qualify as the protagonist, Travis is the audience's surrogate, the character with whom we identify on the profoundest level. From the first scene to his last, Travis is racked with grief over the death of his grandfather. Harrison makes that painfully palpable in his second scene, sitting at the dinner table with his parents. Paul is eating away at his food, fooling himself into thinking they can carry on with their new lives as usual, but Travis doesn't even make a gesture of eating. He just sits there, staring disgustedly at his plate, silently wondering how the hell they can force themselves to eat after what happened to Bud. With little in the way of dialogue, Harrison registers a vast array of complex emotions in his expressive face, from stoical heartbreak and face-contorting horror to awkwardly expressed attraction and breath-holding dread. Travis is revealed to be 17, and Harrison balances the quietness and social awkwardness of an adolescent with the maturity and compassion of someone forced to grow up much too fast. One night, Travis finds Andrew asleep on the floor in Bud's bedroom having a nightmare. He wakes him up and walks him back to his parents' room. As Andrew climbs into bed and lies between his parents, a semi-awake Kim cuddles him in her arms. Travis watches them for a moment and smiles. He seems to admire their close relationship as a family. Perhaps it reminds him of his own bond with his parents when he was younger. 

A slightly eyebrow-raising quirk of Travis' is he likes to sneak into the attic at night and listen to Kim and Will banter with each other in bed. In the case of almost anyone besides Travis, this would seem like a creep in the making, getting his rocks off on listening to couples talk privately. But given Travis' circumstances, it's not hard to understand and empathize with his situation. Since the start of this virus, however long that's been by this point, he's been cooped up inside his home with no one to talk to but his parents and dog. He's lonely and probably more than a tad bored, so listening to these two new, younger people in love, trading silly remarks back and forth, is the closest thing he's had in a long time to entertainment. When you're a teenager stuck in your house with your parents while a fatal, demonic disease is ravaging the entire world, you take what you can get. 

Speaking of Kim, she becomes the first woman Travis has encountered in a significant amount of time. She's older than him, but still young and immensely attractive. Sure, she has a husband with whom share shares a young son, but Travis still can't entirely suppress his attraction to her. And here she is literally living in his home. In my favorite scene of the movie, it's late at night, and Travis can't sleep. He's been having trouble for a long time now, owing to a succession of nightmares about Bud. Armed with a lantern, the only source of light to penetrate the darkness, Travis makes his way downstairs and into the kitchen, where Kim is already seated. For the first time, they have a conversation, linked by their shared inability to get a good night's rest. Shults uses this dialogue to unveil more endearing nuances about his characters. Kim always used to make herself something to eat when she couldn't sleep at home. She invites Travis to sit down across from her. "So, what are we having?" he playfully asks. Kim fantasizes about eating a red velvet cupcake, a cookies and cream cupcake, several flavors of ice cream, and her favorite, bread pudding. Travis, on the other hand, despises sweets, much to Kim's amused astonishment. When his mom used to throw him birthday parties as a kid, he explains, she would make him rice crispy cakes instead of actual cakes. Fear not, however, as he does enjoy certain types of pies. Harrison and Keough play this moment so beautifully, with a pitch-perfect blend of lighthearted humor and a wistful longing for their simpler, happier lives. When Kim leans back against her chair, Travis subtly observes her breasts, which she notices and self-consciously leans forward. It's a superbly directed, entirely silent occurrence that highlights Travis' burgeoning sexuality as well as Kim's understanding of it. It's also one of the few and most effective slices of placidity and hope amid the suffocating horror waiting outside to resurface. The other takes place at the beginning of Will's family's relocation to Paul's. Editors Shults and Matthew Hannam piece together a montage of the two families bonding and working together, set to a jaunty background score. In one shot, the families are playing a board game together, and Will jokingly suggests they play "Buckets" afterward. I could've gone for more scenes like this, but edited in full, without music overriding the chatter. 

In one of his nightmares, Travis wakes up to find Kim sitting beside his bed, staring at him lecherously. She climbs atop him, and as she bends down to kiss him on the lips, a pool of blood spills from her mouth and into Travis'. Once again, with an absence of dialogue, Shults communicates the interior emotions of Travis, visually demonstrating how his new lust for Kim is intermixed with a perpetual apprehension of contracting the deadly disease.

The relationships between the characters are portrayed vividly and believably. It's become pretty standard at this point that when a main character in a horror film owns a dog, nothing good is likely awaiting the dog. In It Comes at Night, Shults revitalizes this tired trope by investing Stanley's outcome, expected as it is, with an earned emotional weight. This isn't simply a case of "dog in a horror film = dead dog." Shults establishes and zeroes in on the brotherly relationship between Travis and Stanley. This dog is his best friend, his only friend. They sleep beside each other in Travis' bedroom in adjacent beds. Sometimes they sleep together on the floor. When Travis is staring out a window for his dad to come home, Stanley sits beside him, and Travis pets him lovingly. I can relate to this bond because I share the same kind with my cat. Many times throughout the day, while I'm sitting on the couch, he will make me pick him up on my lap, where he spends the next several minutes or hours sleeping. Right now, as I type this review, he's sleeping on my bedroom floor directly behind me. Shults isn't content with simply putting an animal in his movie so he can kill them and tug on the audience's heartstrings. He takes the time to establish a bond between him and his owner. As a result, when the inevitable happens, we're not just devastated because a beautiful animal is now dead. That would be too easily manipulative. Rather, we're doubly devastated because we're sharing in Travis' pain over having lost his closest companion. And the look of unconcealed agony on Harrison's contorted face pierces the heart with more force than a bullet. Stanley doesn't just die, either. Shults takes a far more prolonged and emotionally punishing approach to his version of a dog kill, without lingering gratuitously on his suffering. Nonetheless, the virus doesn't kill Stanley outright. It leaves him to suffer in a pool of his own blood, so that his loved ones are tasked with putting him out of his misery. Shults' villain may lack a physical manifestation, but its sheer brutality and heartlessness make it one of the most sadistic and despicable in modern horror.

Kim, Will, and Andrew are shown to be a tight-knit family, which makes it easier to believe in them as real people and hope for their survival. In the aforementioned cute moment where Travis is listening to the couple's conversation from the attic, Will and Kim are lying together in bed, laughing over their mutual need for a bath. Andrew jabs his dad in the foot with his toy dinosaur, and they all sleep together in this one bed. While Sarah sits up in her bed reading a book, Paul snuggles up to her, caressing her leg, resting his head on her lap. It's the end of another long day. They will live to see at least one more. And it's in these quiet, peaceful moments when Paul gets to let his guard down and show some husbandly affection for his wife. No mask, no gloves, and no guns. 

Drew Daniels' cinematography becomes almost like another character, and unlike the actual people populating this uninhabitable world, an omniscient one. He accentuates the serene, picturesque beauty of the family's cabin and surrounding forest, and contrasts it with the claustrophobia of its interiors and the unlimited possibilities for evil lurking outside. POV shots place us behind the eyes of certain characters as they move cautiously through the woods or down hallways. At a few points, Daniel places the camera behind a stack of branches. He uses low-angle shots staring up at the canopy illuminated by a bright white sky. In the nighttime scenes, all the lights in the house are turned off, apparently to help ward off intruders. If a character chooses to stroll, their only source of light is a lantern. In the daytime, the exterior shots are brightly lit by the warm glow of the sun, emphasizing the strengthened sense of safety the characters feel when they're together, free from the unpredictable threats of night. Even when we're not behind the eyes of a character, Daniels' camera takes us on a tour through the setting, roaming leisurely through a dark, narrow hallway, passing by a collection of family portraits hung on the right side of the wooden wall to hint at happier times prior to the outbreak, leading straight to the locked red door at the end. The color surely can't be a coincidence when paired with the blackness of night, evoking the joyless, empty image of hell. Perhaps Daniels' most evocative shot is composed when Stanley, outside in the woods, begins barking violently into the distance. Daniels positions the camera behind Stanley's head, combining his incessant, unsettled barking with the vast expanse of the empty forest. No one and no thing appears to be anywhere within view, but it's clear this dog is able to sense something that our human eyes cannot detect.

While Shults' primary objective is to examine the psychological deterioration of his characters, he isn't entirely above exploiting Travis' nightmares for jump scares. The first one in particular, where the camera zooms in on Bud sitting silently on his bed with his back to the screen, climaxes with a sudden loud jump scare, one that effectively startled me in the moment, but left a somewhat sour aftertaste - that of an easy tactic expected from a less assured director. Fortunately, when the nightmare concludes, its purpose becomes more apparent: to signal the arrival of an intruder, rather than just to deliver a random jolt. As the nightmares continue, however, they begin to take on a more portentous quality where Travis' fate is concerned.

Shults uses dialogue to accomplish two goals: generate a pervasive sense of disquiet and develop the personalities and backstories of his characters. Regarding the former case, take the scene I wrote about earlier between Paul and Will. As they sit across from one another, shooting the breeze and drinking from Bud's stash, their faces filmed in tight close-up, Will talks about his upbringing and refers to himself as an only child. Anyone who was listening to his initial claim of having lived with and lost a brother will gasp in nervousness. In that same exchange, they discuss their jobs prior to the outbreak. Paul was a history teacher, and Will worked manual jobs like construction and became a mechanic like his father. In the current crisis, both family men are driven by an identical objective to protect themselves and their families, but individually, Paul is a white-collar worker and Will is a blue-collar. This dichotomy between their work histories encapsulates the tension underlying their relationship. 

In a dinner scene between the two families, Travis reveals the red door was ajar before he got there the previous night. He suspects Andrew might have opened it before he went to sleep in Bud's room. Immediately the air becomes charged with suspicion, accusation, and apprehension. Sarah is annoyed that Travis is just mentioning this now. Kim is careful not to accuse Travis outright of lying, but suggests maybe he was tired and not seeing correctly in the dark. Sarah sticks up for her son, believing he knows what he saw. All eyes shift to little Andrew. Kim asks if he opened the door, but he claims he can't remember. She implores him to think really hard and quickly grows frustrated with his uncertainty. Unwilling to take any risks, Paul insists they isolate themselves in their bedrooms for a few days. It's never revealed if Andrew opened the door or not because that's how Shults builds and sustains suspense, by leaving us in the dark, often quite literally, alongside his clueless characters.

Shults doesn't incorporate much non-diegetic sound in It Comes at Night. Many scenes play out in total silence and darkness to generate disquiet. He uses minimal music until the end, with composer Brian McOmber's somber score accentuating the tragedy of the deaths of two family members, one in the first scene and one in the second to last. The constant, eerie quietness lends more visceral impact to the sudden moments of loud noises, such as the incessant barking of Stanley into the seemingly deserted forest or the demonic screams of Bud in Travis' nightmares. The most horrifying sound is that of gunshots. By the end of this nightmarish ordeal, four characters have been shot. Shults spares us the sight of the bullet penetrating their skin. Instead, he amplifies the split-second, ear-piercing bang so that it reverberates in our eardrums. At the moment of penetration, his camera cuts away to a reaction shot of someone listening nearby, permitting us to share empathetically in their jolt.

When it comes to the ending of a horror film, the screenwriter will usually go one of two ways: the villain(s) dies, or is at least temporarily incapacitated, and the protagonist(s) survives triumphant; or evil wins and none of the good guys are left alive. If executed correctly, either option can make for an emotionally satisfying conclusion. Some, often in the supernatural subgenre like The Conjuring films, The Babadook, and Get Out, end on a happy note: the family makes it out of the haunted house alive and closer than ever; the storybook demon has been cut down to size and locked up in the basement, and the once-possessed mom has gotten control of her grief and her love for her son is now restored; the would-be enslaved protagonist exacts vengeance on his attackers and escapes in the comfort of his wisecracking best friend. 

But then we have movies like The Witch, The Mist, and Hereditary that end on a much bleaker note. None have had quite the same impact on me as the ending Shults comes up with for It Comes at Night. This is far and away the bleakest, most nihilistic, and gut-wrenching ending I've ever seen in horror. What makes it so singularly horrifying and traumatizing is the sense of inevitability that suffuses it. As hard as the characters work to avoid the fate ultimately thrust on them, it's almost entirely futile. There's no contrivance to it like in Frank Darabont's ending. As superbly directed and conceptually horrifying as his ending to The Mist is, I could never shake the feeling that Frank the writer went way too far out of his way to create the most dispiriting ending he could think of, and the effort showed. Here, Shults doesn't resort to any such contrivances. He allows the story to play out as it realistically would so as to arrive at his final destination organically. The characters don't make any last-minute decisions that are inconsistent with their prior behavior. No one is reduced to a simple hero or villain. Paul, Sarah, Will, and Kim are two married couples who love each other and their children, and want nothing more than to keep themselves alive and healthy. In the end, it's that elemental desire and need, spoiled by their mind-numbing fear of the other side getting them sick, that pushes them to take the most drastic, inhumane measures. 

In this sense, It Comes at Night shares a thematic similarity with another supernatural horror film that follows the less-is-more approach: The Blair Witch Project. Both center around a small group of characters in an isolated, woodsy setting who fall prey to a supernatural influence. Only that presence is never shown onscreen. Instead, it's the fear it creates in the minds of its characters, and their subsequent psychological erosion, that takes center stage. This fear of sickness, and cynicism toward the integrity of humanity, brings out the most monstrous sides of both families, without actually turning them into monsters. Even after a series of vile acts are committed, we still sympathize with the people committing them because they're no different than us: benevolent, loving human beings whose fear gets the best of them. When only one family is left remaining, Shults sits with them and allows them to contemplate the horror of their actions in silence. 

The final shot, in its motionless, silent manner, delivers the final blow to the stomach. Only two people are left sitting across from one another at the kitchen table, and their time is likely limited. Filmed in an extended take, they stare into each other's eyes. Their skin is covered in cuts, bruises, possibly boils. They have nothing to say. All that preparation, all those mandatory rules, the vile acts they committed to keep themselves safe. It was all for nothing, and now they have nothing left to do except sit with each other and wait for death to consume them. And considering what they did shortly before, death might serve as a welcome escape. 

7.8/10