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MA, 91 minutes
There's something in the air throughout this menacingly atmospheric horror film. An airborne virus has brought about the end of civilisation, with the few survivors living on the margins of society and their own beliefs, but beyond that there's the thick, gulping ingestion of fear and the reek of suspicion and the worst of intentions evoked for the best of reasons.
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Trailer: It Comes at Night
Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorises the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order, which will be put to the test when a young family arrives seeking refuge.
In Trey Edward Shults' movie, staying alive is a grim, reductive process. Either you suffer or someone else does. The opening cements both that logic and the sparse, evocative filmmaking. Covered in sores and struggling for every breath, a dying man is comforted by what you realise is his family; the tender despair in their voices makes their love clear, but it's obscured by the gasmasks they wear.
Survival technique has become a bleak ritual, and there's something very sad about the way the ailing sufferer is transported outside in a wheelbarrow â you think of how children like getting rides in them â that ends with lucid orange flame billowing out of a shallow grave. That's part of the power conveyed by the sparse storytelling â it keeps bringing connections and realisations to the surface. Little is said, but much becomes apparent.
![Gasmasks, along with shovels, a wheelbarrow and matches, are part of the crucial survival equipment in It Comes At Night.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170719153956im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/z/0/p/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwz0u2.png/1499312498054.jpg)
The survivors are married couple Paul and Sarah (Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo respectively)Â and their 17-year-old son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison jnr). "I'm doing my best to protect you," Paul tells Sarah, but we hear it as Travis does, muffled and through the floorboards as the boy lurks in the attic of their house. Hearing it second-hand, as Travis does, removes the nuance and makes misinterpretation dangerously easy.
The family's armed readiness is apparent when an intruder enters their domain and they capture Will (Christopher Abbott), who claims to be scavenging for water in what he thought was an abandoned property. After tying him to a tree to wait out signs of infection, Paul decides to offer refuge to Will and his nearby family â wife Kim (Riley Keough) and four-year-old son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). It is the decent thing and a bolstering of safety in numbers.
The cause of the apocalypse is never discussed, or its progress. One gauge is Will's list of his family's assets: "two goats, six chickens, some canned food"; take out "canned"Â and it could be a distant century. The house, with every window boarded up, could also be from an earlier time, when a home was the last line of defence on the frontier. That was also an era when paranoia about others ran deep.
American independent filmmaking has been invigorated by the horror genre these past few years. There's been the terrifying gore of You're Next, the languid mood and unstoppable entity of It Follows, and the 17th-century invocation of The Witch. These features, along with It Comes at Night, are connected to horror's traditions while twisting them into potent new shapes.
![Joel Edgerton as survivor Paul (centre) in a world of the unknown where deep fear has taken hold.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170719153956im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/w/z/0/p/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gwz0u2.png/1499312498054.jpg)
Shults' film has the requisite jump scares, which he delivers with aplomb, but the nightmares which haunt Travis are more Ingmar Bergman than John Carpenter, both pungent and plangent so that it's not always clear if they've really ceased. The narrative becomes a texture, one where fear has taken hold and can't be fully dispelled despite hopeful beginnings.
The It in these circumstances can be many things, but the crucial concept is showing it from the viewpoint of Travis. Isolated in the house, his coming of age interrupted by the end of the world, Travis is fertile ground for desires that are also threats. A middle-of-the-night conversation with Kim is fraught with suggestion, so that she's lodged in his subconscious and its projections.
Travis misses his family bond, and there's the hint he is more comfortable with Will than his own father, but whenever It Comes at Night offers a theme, it's never fully embraced. With his ominous tracking shots and a score that alternates scraped strings and sepulchral organ, Shults uses his marshalled technique to underpin the film, not literary storytelling. Mystery hangs over stifled landscape.
The actors astutely fill in these taut textures. Edgerton is extremely good at revealing the cracks in his character's certainty, although there could have been more of Ejogo as the force behind the throne. Their preparation suggests the couple may have been survivalists, but the lack of background, or easy answers, amplifies the moral weight of what occurs. Any family, Shults shows us, could succumb to the unthinkable.