I just got home from seeing It Comes At Night. The wife loves a good horror-suspense film, and she had read rave reviews all over the internet, so we decided ‘what the hell’ and let Netflix cool off for an evening. Well I don’t know if we saw the same movie as the internet, but both she and I walked out of that theater extremely disappointed. And from the grumblings I heard in the audience after the lights went on, we weren’t the only ones that felt that way.
So out of curiosity I perused the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes myself. The “Critics Consensus” was this, and I’m quoting directly from their review page.
It Comes at Night makes lethally effective use of its bare-bones trappings while proving once again that what’s left unseen can be just as horrifying as anything on the screen.
Ah, “what’s left unseen.” The magic bullet of every under-budgeted indie film ever made. It’s true, what’s left unseen lets the mind wander, and your imagination go wild. It’s been used quite effectively, not only in horror movies like Psycho and The Blair Witch Project, but in cult classics like Reservoir Dogs as well. But It Comes At Night makes the fatal mistake of keeping the viewer in the dark for the entirety of the film. It uses the backdrop of an unknown epidemic as a setup for a claustrophobic drama about family and trust. That was really all I would’ve needed to know in order to say “Eh, I’ll wait for it on Netflix, put it in my queue and then probably never watch it.”
Nothing in the film was done poorly. The cinematography was fine, the acting was fine, and there weren’t any cheesy moments that made you roll your eyes, except for one unexpectedly odd decision that sets up the climax.
My problem isn’t with the technical aspects of the movie, but the story-telling is so full of questions and red herrings that during the drive home my wife and I were just throwing questions at each other. “Why this?” and “Why that?” By time we got home we weren’t any closer to having an answer.
The characters in the film don’t know what the epidemic is or what’s happening. I’m okay with that, films have been doing that for years. Zombie movies don’t know why there are zombies, Cloverfield didn’t know why it was Cloverfield. We can accept that for some things, we know as much as the characters do. After that initial exposition though, the audience was treated to fake-out after fake-out, and story developments that just didn’t go anywhere.
It Comes At Night is a misleading title. What exactly is supposed to come at night is never revealed. In fact, there’s no real indication that the night is any more dangerous than the day. The Dad even says “We never go out at night.” Why? WHAT IS IN THE NIGHT?!?!?
While it is suspenseful, it’s not horror. And even the suspense starts to wear thin after the fifth or sixth time the director ramps up the tension and the music, then quickly pulls it back before anything actually happens. As a viewer, if you want to keep me invested, you better throw me a bone every once in a while. Nobody goes to a strip club to watch the stripper almost take her clothes off for two hours. At some point there has to be a payoff, and this movie has none.
But that’s just my opinion.
