After an illness wipes out most of humanity, a family fights for
survival alone in the woods until a family of three arrives seeking help. HORROR
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It Comes at Night (2017)Written and Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Starring Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Pendleton |
All of the promotional material for this film pointed towards it being an unforgettable psychological horror extravaganza on par with A24's last big one, The Witch. It sported a solid cast and was mysterious enough to warrant a watch. Watching it, however, was another story. It Comes at Night is a disastrously dull affair that seems to be missing many crucial elements of storytelling, mainly plot and character development. We are never told what exactly is coming at night, and the movie never attempts to give us any sort of monster to look forward to. I think what they were going for was that people can be monsters in dire circumstances, but the narrative is so fast and loose that the audience never has a chance to make that connection.
From the first scene of the film, the audience is in the dark. We don't know what happened to the world, we don't know what the family's afraid of, and we don't know why everybody only sometimes wears gas masks. The movie just assumes we can follow the story with zero explanation of our setting or situation. It's a shoddy attempt at an artsy horror film, but it never once feels like a horror film. At most, it's a psychological drama, but that's a generous description. The cast all plays it too safe, acting out tropes we've seen a hundred times before in post-apocalyptic films. There was never a moment in this film when I felt scared, uneasy, or even interested. The third act tries to repair the damage, but by then the audience has already checked out. No deaths have meaning because we were never given time to care about the characters. No scenes have any real impact because we simply don't know what the hell is going on. Writer-director Trey Edward Shults needs to take a few night classes on storytelling if he wants to have any hope of making something halfway decent. God knows he can't do any worse. |