One film we were a little surprised not to see in the Cannes line-up this year was Trey Edward Shults’ “It Comes At Night.” The festival often has indie-minded U.S. genre fare like this at least in a sidebar — “It Follows” and “Green Room” both premiered in recent years — and Shults’ startling debut film “Krisha” played at the festival a couple of years back too. Announcements came and went without the film’s name mentioned, but it turns out that A24 had a different game-plan in mind: they world-premiered the film as a Secret Screening at this weekend’s Overlook Film Festival in Oregon (set at the location featured in “The Shining”), and now dropped a full trailer for the movie ahead of its release next month.
Shults’ film takes some of the themes from “Krisha” and implants them into a post-apocalyptic wilderness, as a tight-knit unit of survivors (Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo and, as their son, Kelvin Harrison Jr) welcome in a newcomer couple (Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough), only to find their survival put at stake. Reviews from Overlook are strong (a five star review from Time Out’s Joshua Rothkopf called it “as harrowing as post-apocalyptic nightmares come,” while Uproxx’s Keith Phipps said it was “an unnerving, masterful piece of horror filmmaking”), and the trailer continues to make it look a nightmare in the best possible way.
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Reaction to the teaser was so strong that A24 moved the release up by a couple of months, so this could well be another horror sleeper hit in a year that’s already been full of them: as Edgerton told Entertainment Weekly recently “Let’s be honest, horror movies have a bad rap. It’s up to movies like ‘Get Out’ and “It Follows’ — and this movie, I hope — to remove the stigma of what I refer to as the ‘blood porn’ nature of horror. Horror films can be incredibly intelligent.” Watch the new trailer below, and find the film in theaters from June 9th.
