Writer: Trey Edwards Shults
DOP: Drew Daniels
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Riley Keough
Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son. Then a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.
The film is very light on exposition and it takes a good half an hour or so for us the audience to figure out what exactly is going on. The protagonists themselves don't exactly know what really happened and how many people might have survived. Their house is secluded and in the woods and film begins with them deciding to kill the grandfather who is infected. Trust is always an issue. The film really got some hype due to its poster, trailer and the rave reviews it generated from the critics. The audience had a mixed reaction to it because its marketing was quite misleading as it is in fact a psychological thriller orather than horror. The sequences that they used in the trailer were largely from the nightmares that the teenager is having and the director does not hide that they are so in the film. He intentionally opens up different possibilities and none of them are resolved. It ends up as another one of those 'What fucked up things humans are capable of doing when they are desperate' films and my reaction to it was 'meh'. It is well made and all that but I really don't get all the hype. I hadn't even seen the trailer or posters to be actually misled by it. Had to be said though that the initial scenes do build up tension really well.
One film I was reminded of was the excellent 'Martha Marcy May Marlene' even though the premise is very different. Maybe it is the secluded cabin in the woods kind of settings. Joel Edgerton was excellent in 'Black Mass' and he is the same in 'It Comes at Night', a title which don't need to be changed for its porn remake. In fact the entire cast is great. When the new family comes in there is a power dynamics at play between the two family heads and the hormonal teenager is also affected by the young wife. Like all things in the film, the director does not expand further on it. He supposedly stated that he wanted the audience to be as confused as the protagonists are and that can work really well on many occasions. Great performances, aspect ratio gimmicks and all that aside, but it didn't do it for me here. Checkout Xavier Dolan's 'Mommy' for some great use of aspect ratio as a storytelling device.
Rating: 3/5
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