Fear in the Dark
It Comes at Night really does ask an awful lot. Waiting for something unexpected to happen, we must endure such extreme economy of plot and character development that we begin to wonder if there’s actually a story in there at all.
The movie begins with a father and son (Joe Edgerton and Kevin Harrison Jr.), in biohazard masks, wheeling “grandpa” outside, putting a round in his head, then burning his body. We gather from grandpa’s ashen face and rancid skin that the disposal is justified – one of cinema’s world-ending plagues seems to be on the loose.
A rather arresting prologue, it if weren’t so familiar. Surely, we’ve visited this millenarian world a few too many times to be as shocked as the filmmakers would like.
And without shock, they have precious little else to rely on for entertainment in the first act. There is a maxim in the screenwriting profession that one should begin a scene at the very latest moment possible. The filmmakers of It Comes at Night appear to have taken that advice so seriously that they have left out some rather vital details.
Who is this family living in an old home-turned-biohazard shelter? What do they want? We have no idea. The son has nightmares, eavesdrops on his parents, and seems in dire need of date. The father is determined against all hope to simply survive. The mother is determined against all hope to maintain the family unit.
But a larger plot is harder to ascertain…
…at least until something goes bump in the night.
That something turns out to be someone – a would-be thief who claims to be a family man searching for water. From there…well, things almost start to happen.
Another maxim in dramaturgy: plant a gun on the mantel in the first act and it had better go off by the third. It Comes at Night places guns on every mantle, awning, cornice, and overhang in sight. By the third act, we’re still waiting for a pop.
And that’s the overwhelming sensation of It Comes at Night – that the filmmakers are holding back from us; that there’s a three hour long “director’s cut” buried somewhere in this hour and thirty-seven-minute movie.
Which is not to say it’s a bad film. Not at all…because every time we begin to grow bored, the filmmakers pencil in an unexpected twist to keep us watching. And so it goes for about an hour and a half, like an expert strip tease, until, slowly, the film succeeds in indoctrinating us that something big is on its way. Before we know it, we have slipped toward the edges of our seats.
So what comes at night? Walking out of the theater, we didn’t have the slightest idea.