Rarely have I been so ticked off by an American horror feature as I was by It Comes at Night, an arty new film written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Shults’s script is undercooked and his direction is needlessly mannered; moreover, neither the writing or the visual approach is interesting enough to transcend the familiarity of the story, about a middle-class family’s efforts to survive in a postapocalyptic United States. Shults’s ideas are hand-me-downs from George A. Romero’s works and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, both of which deal with themes of individualism and societal construction with more nuance—and far less pretension—than he does. But after reading some positive reviews of It Comes at Night (in particular, A.O. Scott’s in the New York Times), I was ready to reconsider it. On a return viewing, perhaps I could look past Shults’s distracting style and appreciate his psychological approach to character and his consideration of social control.
The conflict wouldn’t feel so prominent if the film’s story gave viewers more to chew on, but Shults’s minimalist narrative only teases at ideas. The second half of It Comes at Night centers on the tension that arises in Paul’s home after Will and his family move in. The two families attempt to trust each other, but Paul is so cold that no real sense of camaraderie blossoms. Paul’s son, Travis, develops a rapport with the new family, and one senses that Paul might feel jealous over this, but Shults doesn’t provide enough detail for us to be certain. This isn’t the only thing that the writer-director stays vague about. It isn’t clear what caused society to collapse, what the world is like beyond the woods where the characters live, or what happens exactly to characters who catch the deadly disease that everyone’s so afraid of. One could argue that the movie’s ambiguities serve to foreground the characterization of Paul and the interpersonal dynamics among the other characters. Yet they also have the effect of making the horror elements feel like mere window dressing on a half-baked narrative.
