Saturday, September 9, 2017


¡QUÉ HORROR2017
Candidate #16

IT COMES AT NIGHT
(April 2017)


Writer/director Trey Edward Shults' second feature film, It Comes at Night, sets us down in the middle of yet another post-apocalyptic scenario. To the film’s benefit, the narrative doesn’t play out as per your usual post-apocalypse de rigueur.
We don’t witness the catastrophe that triggers the collapse (and specific details are never really offered). All we really know is the unfortunate can become sick, and when that happens, drastic measures need to be taken.
Instead, the story’s focus is Paul (Joel Edgerton, also the film’s Executive Producer) and his family (wife, teen-aged son, and father-in-law’s dog, Stanley) living far away from the city.


Shults tells his story at a very slow and deliberate pace, and some may even wonder if this is actually a “horror movie.”
Since it’s in the running for a ¡Q horror! 2017 slot, it’s safe to assume I believe it qualifies. Because, while the journey is a slow, low-key one, the ultimate destination is a harrowingly brutal gut punch, the horror, the kind that underscores the tragic hollowness of that most banal and grotesque of platitudes uttered in the face of mind-numbing, soul-crushing disaster: “Everything’s gonna be okay.”


(It Comes at Night OS’ courtesy of aintitcool.com & bloody-disgusting.com.)

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