It Comes At Night Review

R:  Violence, Disturbing Images, and Language

A24,  Animal Kingdom

1 Hr and 31 Minutes

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Riley Keough

REVIEW: From A24. 

That's all I need to hear. Seriously this studio is one of the best distributors that came out of the blue. I haven’t seen a disappointing flick from them yet. Yeah sure every once in a while they'll release something mediocre, but when they have so many films that I love such as Obvious Child, Ex Machina, Room, Swiss Army Man, and the recent Best Picture winner La La--I MEAN MOONLIGHT, who can complain about what they produce. They have been releasing critical hit after critical hit that is quality efficient regarding both story and production.  So when I see a film released by A24, I make sure to have my butt in the nearest theater possible.

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, but this will soon be put to the test when a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.

THE GOOD: This is not a horror film! All that stuff is in the trailer is just marketing to get you to see this. All of the horror elements are brief images that come from their son Travis' nightmares. Honestly, it's hard to classify this movie. It's a psychological thriller but with horrific elements. Imagine a DLC side story in a zombie video game without seeing the zombie. 

The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where people catch diseases pretty quickly, and the only solution is violence. In any other movie you would get a character explaining what happened through expositional monologue, but here it's explained through painting.

What we see here is a violent dog eat dog world from the little we are shown. You see everyone is gun crazy and result to using their weapons in order to remain safe and dominant. This family is paranoid of having anything enter their home and honestly you can tell why. Would you want your family member to be in a disease that is extremely and easily contagious? 

As I said earlier, this entire family is paranoid from the outside world especially Joel Egerton who will knock you out cold and kill you immediately after to protect his family. As the film goes along, more characters and themes are introduced to progress what the story is really about. 

As A24 films go, this tends to get weird and sometimes sidetracked. It is unafraid to go the uncomfortable route, but in the end, a lot of it makes sense. Travis lacks social skills, but you can tell he has only known his family for the majority of his life because when he encounters with others, he has no idea what to do. 

From the 1st act, the movie begins to play mind games with you. Sometimes you are unable to decipher when a sequence is either a dream or reality. He’s near the age of a grown man, but he has the mentality of a pre-teen.

Everything about the built up tension is organic to a point it becomes both intense, shocking, and most of all unsettling. It's not a film that relies on violence and gore, but one that asks the question how far are we willing to go to maintain humanity. It's a movie that has the constant theme of nature vs. nurture, and it's effective.

THE BAD: The worst thing about this film is how it's marketed.  If you walk in thinking this is a horror movie, YOU ARE DEAD WRONG! And honestly, that is a shame because it looks like what is by both title and trailer. I still think to this day that one of the best marketing twists that worked for a movie was The Spongebob Movie: Sponge out of Water. The trailers focused so much on the live action sequences that by the time you see it, you realize only the last 15 minutes of the film is in live action 3D. The reason it worked for Spongebob’s favor was that it still stayed right to be Spongebob.  The reason why this doesn’t work is that you have something that claims to be horror turn out to be something completely different. A lot of people aren’t going to be satisfied with this, and honestly, there were so many abandoned thread lines that by the time the film concludes you’re either going to be confused or pissed. 

LAST STATEMENT: Engagingly unsettling with a lot of thrilling psychological elements, It Comes at Night is a compelling thriller even though it tends to abandon several plot threads that could’ve been explored along the way.

Rating: 3.5/5 | 73%

Super Scene: Who opened the door?