★★★
(MA) 91 minutes
For anyone interested in making a low-budget horror film, here's a viable modern formula. Isolate a small group of characters in a single location: an underground bunker, say, or a house in the woods. At the head of this group, place a white male leader, bent on maintaining his authority at any cost. Have him justify his controlling ways as necessary to keep the group safe – and then leave us guessing whether the true danger comes from outside or from within.
Over the past couple of years, we've seen versions of this plot in films ranging from Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane to Robert Eggers' The Witch. Here it is again in It Comes At Night, the second feature from the talented young Texan director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) – nominally a post-apocalyptic nightmare, set in a near-future America ravaged by a plague akin to the Black Death.
For Shults, though, this is a framework and little more. We're not told where the plague came from, nor is there much talk of the future of humanity as a species. The characters are focused on surviving from day to day – but many details of how they achieve this are likewise left vague.
What counts is the group dynamic. Holed up in the secluded, sprawling country house that serves as the main location are a family of three: bearded patriarch Paul (Joel Edgerton) – who eventually identifies himself as a former history teacher – Paul's obedient wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr), their sensitive teenage son.
To ensure safety, Paul enforces strict rules: gas masks, for instance, must be worn when venturing outside or dealing with strangers. At the start of the film, a fourth family member, Sarah's father (David Pendleton), is struck down with the plague – and the immediate outcome shows just how tough Paul is willing to be.
The inevitable challenge to his rule occurs through the arrival of a second, mirroring family group, consisting of young couple Will (Christopher Abbott) and Kim (Riley Keough) and their toddler son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). After taking Will prisoner, Paul overcomes his suspicions enough to let the new arrivals stick around, while making it clear who's in charge.
From the outset, there are plenty of unsubtle hints that things won't end well: the reverberating strings and eerie bleeps of Brian McOmber's score, or the print of Bruegel's The Triumph of Death on Travis' bedroom wall, surely the last image you'd want to see before dropping off. But despite all this, the film feels more like an indie art film than a generic shocker. The title is a tease, with no immediate indication of what "it" might refer to; perhaps simply Travis' recurrent nightmares, which supply many of the more explicit moments of horror.
Both in the lantern-lit interiors and the scenes in the woods, Shults and his cinematographer, Drew Daniels, come close to the shadowy, underexposed look favoured by another up-and-coming Texan filmmaker, David Lowery (Pete's Dragon). As in Lowery's work, darkness equals omnipresent mystery – an effect reinforced by sonic devices such as the deliberately muffled dialogue when the characters are wearing their masks, or when Travis eavesdrops on Will and Kim from the attic.
Some viewers will be frustrated by Shults' refusal to flesh out the background of the story, or develop the characters beyond a certain point. But his B-movie economy – the film's running time is just 91 minutes – leaves room for us to imagine our own solutions to the mysteries, and decide for ourselves where our sympathies lie. Travis, an onlooker much of the time, serves to a degree as our surrogate – but Paul remains the nearest thing in sight to a hero, and it's by no means clear that his choices are "wrong".
In this sense, It Comes At Night feels tailor-made for the ambiguous screen persona of Edgerton, an Australian who has recently been working mostly in the US. In films like Jeff Nichols' Loving, he's a representative of homely decency comparable to the middle-period Tom Hanks – but his narrow eyes and fixed frown can also suggest something resentful and inward-looking, even malign. Given the current preoccupations of American filmmakers, this versatility is bound to keep him in employment for a long time to come.