‘It Comes At Night’ … Or It Doesn’t, In Trey Edward Shults’ New Horror Film

We should probably establish up front that I’m not the kind of person you’ll usually find complaining that a movie goes too far. After all, that was me in the front row last time the Harvard Film Archive showed Pier Paolo Pasolini’s still-appalling “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” and I apologize to everyone who was subjected to my incessant cackling when Oliver Reed was burnt at the stake during the Brattle’s recent screening of “The Devils.” I don’t buy many DVDs these days, but the last two I made a point of purchasing were William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe” and Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” because those are the kind of films I like to re-watch over and over again in the comfort of my home. Obviously I’m terrible at picking movies for date nights.

The low-budget horror film “It Comes at Night” opened last weekend on a wave of rapturous reviews, a rare occurrence for such a disreputable genre. The sophomore effort from gifted writer-director Trey Edward Shults, it’s an icky, post-apocalyptic wallow that relies on gut-churning dread instead of traditional jump-scares. I hated it. In fact, I hated it so much I didn’t even want to talk to anybody afterward and went for a long walk by myself.

Christopher Abbott in “It Comes At Night.” (Courtesy Eric McNatt/A24)

This came as something of a shock because I considered Shults’ debut, the micro-budgeted “Krisha,” one of last year’s better films. Chronicling a fraught family’s Thanksgiving dinner with such expressionistically stylized camerawork and sound design that the whole feature felt like a frayed nerve, “Krisha” was a domestic drama shot as if it were a horror movie.

“It Comes at Night” is just a plain old horror movie, and not a terribly original one at that. Set sometime after a vicious virus has wiped out the major cities, we’re hunkered down in a remote cabin in the woods with a rough-hewn survivalist type (Joel Edgerton, the least interesting actor in movies today), his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and teenage son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) We meet the happy family wearing gas masks while they’re mercy-killing grandpa, who vomits blood and oozes pus from giant boils on his limbs as he succumbs to this agonizing, unnamed disease. Alas, the film never really regains the happy-go-lucky, frolicsome spirit of this early euthanasia and only grows more grindingly unpleasant as it wears on.

This movie ruined my afternoon. “It Comes at Night” made me feel awful, which then made me angry because I didn’t feel like the movie had earned the right to do so. In the past, I’ve highly recommended films far more violent and perhaps even more unpleasant than this one, but those often tend to be serving some sort of higher calling — whether it a philosophical inquiry or shared experience of humanity — something you take away from the movie that makes the whole ordeal worth going through. Sure, movies like “Silence” or Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” are tough sits, but purposefully so — they’re difficult with the intention of challenging the viewer to see the world in a different way.