'It Comes At Night's' Bleak Realism Terrifies More Than Ever During A Global Pandemic

For a while, it seemed like the primary legacy of Trey Edward Shults’ “It Comes at Night” would be its CinemaScore rating – one of the notorious handful of D’s handed out by the survey organization, which polls opening weekend audiences for their reactions to new releases. (Back when we went to the theaters to see movies? You remember.) A low Cinemascore grade is usually less about the quality of the motion picture than how accurately the films were marketed; ads for “It Comes at Night” promised a jump-scare fright-fest, and instead, audiences got a grim chamber piece about certain death.

These days, it plays even grimmer. When I first saw it, that summer of 2017, my infant daughter had just broken a week-long fever, and it felt like Shults forcefully captured the way dread can creep through a household when someone in it is sick. But now, during a global pandemic, much more of the film hits differently – dramatizing, as it does, the story of two families quarantining together as a highly contagious “sickness” ravages the land.

Shults comes in hard, with a horrifying prologue in which the infected grandfather of the focal family is taken out to the woods in a wheelbarrow by his grandson and son-in-law—the latter puts a bullet in the old man’s head, tosses him into a hole in the ground, and set him on fire. We quickly get a sense, from the efficiency of their actions and their reaction to the loss, that we’re joining them well into this crisis – these are people who have already been through some shit. Shults’ script doesn’t wade into the details of this reality, and doesn’t really need to; he’s less interested in how they got there than in how life is now. There’s no “return to normal” in the cards, it seems.

The patriarch is Paul (Joel Edgerton), his wife is Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and their son is Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). And then, in the middle of the night, a stranger appears at their door. Unlike the family, who all don masks and gloves when they go outdoors, he only wears a bandana over his face (a detail that sticks out even more given current circumstances). His name is Will (Christopher Abbott), and he assures Paul that he is not “sick”; he is seeking water and supplies for himself and his family, who are running out. They have animals and non-perishables to trade. The two men size each other up, already at the depths of their desperation. “My family’s all that matters to me,” Will insists. “I know you can understand that.”

Paul decides to trust this stranger, joining him on the journey back to Will’s wife Kim (Riley Keough) and their son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), staying with them long enough to be sure that no one is sick, and then bringing them back to Paul and Sarah’s home, so they can all pool resources. There are rules and precautions to follow, and logistics to iron out. (“We think it’s important to keep a routine and stay busy,” Paul explains, another line that lands hard these days.)

And for a time, it works; the two families merge into one big one, sharing responsibilities, looking out for each other, providing comfort and support, a lovely, semi-lyrical interlude of utopian communal idealism. But one night, Travis finds the front door open and Andrew sleeping in the wrong room, and no one can really explain why or how, but they all know it’s bad, and we see how tenuous all that trust and camaraderie is, and how quickly it erodes. The two families quarantine away from each other, and they get suspicious, bending their ears at coughs and cries. Long, slow, dread-filled tracking shots take us to the front door, where the Invisible Enemy once lurked outside and may have snuck in.

In these passages, and their blurring of the conscious and subconscious, Shults notes how just being near sickness can itself infect you, taking residence in your brain, your soul, and most of all, your dreams; a weird, drowsy existence, as some of us know, gives rise to truly unsettling visions. (It should also be noted that the film plays this note too often; there are too damn many fake-out wake-ups.) But if that nightmare imagery was the most frightening element of “It Comes At Night” three short years ago, it’s been replaced by the doomed inevitability of its third act.

Travis becomes convinced that Andrew is sick, and the situation is undeniably sticky: if Andrew is sick, his family has to go. But if they go, they’ll most likely die – or they’ll come back, taking what they need and/or the home with force. They have to go, at gunpoint if necessary. “I don’t think we can take the chance,” Paul says. “I don’t think we can risk it.”

And so the moral dilemma at the film’s center – the difficulty of balancing one’s humanity and empathy for others with the inherent instinct of self-preservation – which seemed so hypothetical in 2017 now feels all but inevitable. (I’ve had the worst-case nightmare where someone’s at my door, and maybe you have too.) On a far grander scale, the question of letting others die so that you can survive was asked long ago in the corridors of power, and, it seems, answered quickly in the affirmative.

Maybe that’s why (as Drew McWeeney noted when I mentioned this film on Twitter recently) “It Comes At Night” hasn’t become the kind of essential quarantine viewing that “Contagion” or “Outbreak” has – because, at the end of the day, those are films about hope, about scientists and officials swooping in, doing their jobs competently, and saving the day. Here, we’re on our own, and that sense of solitude and lawlessness renders the genuine horror and bleakness of the conclusion all the more upsetting. It didn’t have to end like this. Or maybe it did.

“It Comes at Night” is streaming on Netflix.