Review of It Comes at Night (2017) by Nick C — 03 Jul 2017

Sometimes what is scariest is what is left unseen. The Blair Witch Project attempted to demonstrate that back in 1999, but for me, it came off as laughably bad because the entire film was basically an argument about a map. This film demonstrates that idea perfectly though; it is unremittingly grim, tense, bleak, dark, and horrifying, but the horror is achieved in unconventional ways.

The film stars Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, and, Kelvin Harrison Jr. as a family of three in some unspecified time in the future, after some unspecified disease has ravaged the world. They live in a house in the middle of the woods that is completely sealed off, save for one door. By minimizing the entrances, they minimize the chance of an unspecified threat doing them harm. By now you've noticed that a lot of things in this movie are unspecified. That's true. They are. And they remain that way. The audience is thrown into the world that these characters live in with no exposition, and are forced to try and understand what is happening. This achieves a level of realism that makes the horror aspects all the more chilling. The family ends up having to care for another family, and that's as far as I'll go in terms of plot. The rest you must discover on your own.

One thing I will say about this film is that it's one of the hardest to defend for being great. Why it is great is hard to logically discern at times. It's dark, it's tense, and it works perfectly as a thriller. We see the main family's ever decreasing morality as they try to defend themselves out of fear, as their child (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) watches in horror at what they've become. And we get an ambiguous ending that is truly powerful whether or not you "understand" it, or how you choose to interpret it. Those are some of the good aspects of it.

But why it is a truly great film aren't points that I could simply list out in a review. There was something more to this movie, something greater, something atmospheric that you will only understand while watching the movie. This movie is an experience.

One note of warning: don't walk in expecting a conventional horror film. It's anything but conventional. It poses intriguing questions without satisfying answers, and doesn't deliver the typical genre thrills that horror fans have come to expect. It's an exercise of bleak tone, non-stop tension, and true horror. That's another thing. This movie is scary. I got chills while watching it. I can't remember the last time a horror movie did that.

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Rating: 4/4.