IT COMES AT NIGHT: Home Sick

Director: Trey Edward Shults
Writer: Trey Edward Shults
Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough
Runtime: 91 mins.
2017

There's misleading advertising, which is frustrating but understandable. Creatives typically have no sway over what marketing does with their work. After all it is marketing's job to make a thing seem as appealing as possible, regardless of quality or content.

Then there's false advertising. In 2002, Warner Bros. released a trailer for their new family-aimed comedy, Kangaroo Jack, which heavily featured a computer animated kangaroo with a Hawaaian shirt and sunglasses. This kangaroo saw fit to rap at the audience. A great many 90's kids sought the acquaintance of this rapping kangaroo.

To the chagrin of all, the film consisted entirely of two idiots chasing a legitimate kangaroo across the Australian outback. The film was paced like settling bricks and contained what even child me recognized to be an overabundance of fart jokes. Still I waited for the kangaroo to anthropomorphize itself, but all of the rapping kangaroo content was restricted to one measly dehydrated dream sequence.*

*The counterexample to all this is the woman who sued Drive for false advertising. The advertisements promised a slick action thriller, but the movie itself was a lugubrious meditation on masculinity and violence. I side with Drive in this example, but I side with the audience in the Kangaroo Jack example. I don't know whether there's a distinction to be made between types of false advertising, or if I just like Drive far more than I like Kangaroo Jack. If there is a distinction, it might be between a marketing department that probably didn't know how to advertise the film it had (Drive), and a marketing department that went to great lengths to occlude the actual content of their film (Kangaroo Jack).

My point is that It Comes at Night comes dangerously close to Kangaroo Jacking us. The film has been marketed and heralded as a new indie horror contender among the likes of The Witch, The Babadook, or It Follows. Yet It Comes at Night is not such a horror film.


From hereon out I must warn you of spoilers, because I can't talk about the tenor of It Comes without discussing what it's not, which invariably implies what it is. So read no further if you care about that, because I'm about to tell you...

The spoiler is that there are no spoilers. It Comes is a deliberately withholding story about a family of three hunkered down in a lovely rustic home in the middle of the woods. We learn through implication and osmosis that a devastating plague has swept through America, the latest victim being the protagonist's grandfather, who we only meet in the throes of the disease. _____ insists on protecting his family by all means necessary, including a stockpile of firearms and gas masks. Meanwhile, _____ seeks to stabilize the household's tensions, and ______ slowly succumbs to them. He is tormented by vivid dreams of sickness and encountering... something in the woods.

But there is nothing in the woods. Just as the film feels like it ought to be gearing up for some long-simmering reveal, it ends abruptly, and we are left to believe that there was only ever plague. This is both the film's greatest frustration and its central conceit. As it turns out, It Comes is about paranoia--the way it creeps into lives, taints households, and dominates the way we perceive others. In that sense, It Comes is really much more of a psycho-thriller, and a solid one at that. The central performances are layered, subtle, and well-cushioned by the patient editing. ______ has a keen eye for the menace of the film's environments. The _____'s home is an iconic horror setting, with abrupt corners, stretching hallways, and all manner of rooms tucked away from each other. It's only out-sinistered by the surrounding woods. It Comes excels most when ____ and ____ are photographing these places with an eye towards primal fascination--beauty and terror wrapped into the same breathless fixation.

Unlike a lot of audiences (the film got a "D" on _____), I am so down for what It Comes is doing conceptually. Propped up by all the wonderful craftsmanship mentioned above, It Comes uses our horror genre expectations to make a commentary on how we project our interpersonal anxieties onto external forces--and vice versa. Whether these forces are real or imagined is largely besides the point. The "It" that "Comes" is paranoia, fear.

Again, I am so down for this as an idea, but It Comes does not adequately walk the tightrope needed to pull this off. The most egregious miscalculation is that the text of the film all but demands some sort of monster. That force could be a supernatural stand-in for paranoia (cf It Follows), but it has to be something. Otherwise, so many of the events of the film, including ____'s premonitory dreams, feels simply like cheats meant to throw us off the path. It's a shame, because all it needed to do was lean into the strong performances and choking atmosphere. ____ and co. are almost daring us to protest, with "you don't understand what we were going for" resting ready on their lips. Yet I cannot chalk up the deep dissatisfaction of the ending entirely to my own narrow-mindedness. The movie simply sets up what it deliberately refuses to pay off.

It Comes is impeccably designed, to the point that it legitimately takes a swipe at recent horror masterpieces like The Babadook or The Invitation or The Witch. The difference is that, unlike those movies, this one refuses to pick a lane--supernatural horror or psycho-thriller? Its willful obfuscation of those two categories is a worthy experiment, but one that convolutes the potentiality of both superior versions of itself.

2.5 / 5  BLOBS