‘It Comes at Night’ Ending Explained: Sometimes the Biggest Scares Come From Within

The world of Trey Edward Shults‘s It Comes at Night is steeped in unexplainable existential dread and suggests that the things you can’t see, the ones that go bump and gurgle in the darkness, are often the scariest. It Comes at Night, at its core, is a film about family and protecting it at any cost, and what we lose when we no longer trust the ones closest to us.

The film centers on a family riding out a deadly disease by isolating themselves in the woods. Paul (Joel Edgerton) distrusts Will (Christopher Abbott), a stranger who shows up on the family’s property, and his story from the jump, and the film wastes zero time showing Paul’s distrust and lack of empathy. He executes his father-in-law Bud (David Pendleton) in the opening minutes and burns his body like he’s taking out the trash.

COLLIDER VIDEO OF THE DAY

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

Paul’s emotionless, hardened demeanor is the primary catalyst for the characters’ collective demises. Paul and his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) are too focused on Will, Will’s wife Kim (Riley Keough), and their son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner)’s possible duplicitousness that they’re blinded to the fact that their own son, Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), is most likely to reason for the infection.

RELATED: ‘It Comes At Night’ Review: The Dark, Disturbing Places We’ll Go to Protect Our Loved Ones

Toward the middle of the film, Travis, plagued by gruesome nightmares and unable to sleep, discovers Andrew asleep on Bud’s floor and the front door unlocked, sending both families on high alert. Outside, Will and Paul find Travis’s badly mangled dog Stanley on the porch after the dog ran off earlier to chase an unseen foe lurking in the distance. Travis tells the families that the front door was open when he came downstairs, and Sarah suggests that Andrew might be the cause, which causes an uproar from Kim and Will. But if Travis opened the door while sleepwalking, who left it unlocked? At the beginning of the film, Paul lectures Will’s family about the rules of the house, including that the front door is to stay locked all night with a key Paul or Sarah wear around their neck. So, did Travis steal the key and unlock the door while he was asleep, or was it someone else? Paul starts to enjoy having Will and his family around, growing close to them, and even lets his guard down for a moment before being consumed by paranoia and suspicion. Did Paul forget to lock the door before bed? The answer is ultimately inconclusive.

Image via A24

It Comes at Night intentionally withholds the truth from the audience, suggesting the contagion came from within the home rather than outside. Bud is the first and only infected shown on screen, and we’re never shown what a full-blown infection will turn into, but it’s eluded that it might be similar to the zombie, mutant variety, based on what we hear and what Travis sees towards the end. And Travis’s close relationship with his late grandfather might link him to the spread of the contagion and the misinformation. Paul, Sarah, and Travis are so consumed by their fears of what lurks outside their isolated, fortified walls that the family cannot see how their possibly misplaced and unfounded suspicions, and lack of transparency, lead to their inevitable downfall.

At its most base level, It Comes at Night is a film about grief and fear. Reeling from the loss of his grandfather, Travis is searching for an ounce of normalcy in an abnormal world. In an unknown location in the woods, Travis and his family have been sequestered from society for so long that it’s hard for them to decipher if Will and his family are friends or foes. During a nightcap over a couple of glasses of whiskey, Will contradicts a personal story, which sends Paul on high alert. Will is guilty of something, not who he says he is, or lied to Paul to protect his family. And as tensions heighten and boil over out of control, the families turn on each other in desperate acts of self-preservation as a means of survival. And when fight or flight is a person’s overriding directive, nuances and sanity are painfully omitted. The identity of the door-opening culprit is never revealed, but it’s safe to assume that it was either Paul, Sarah, or Travis, and not Will or his family. But Will’s innocence isn’t necessarily conclusive either.

Image Via A24

Paul suggests everyone quarantine for a few days to ensure no one is ill, and later, Travis suffers another “dream.” In the dream, Travis walks through the forest at night while an obscured Stanley barks unseen in the distance. Travis stops and picks up a gun in the road and follows the sounds up a hill. The sound of an increasingly aggressive Stanley, snarling and on alert, is attacked by a predator gargling in the distance while Travis watches in horror. Later, in the same dream, Travis imagines he’s infected, pukes up black viscous bile, and is visited by a reanimated Bud, who wails before jolting Travis awake. In the film’s brutal climax and after a paranoia-induced scuffle, Paul and Sarah kill Will and his family after Travis suggests to his parents that he and Andrew may both be infected. But it’s not until the film’s final moments that we see Travis, on the edge of death, imagining himself wandering down the hall and exiting the home at night to search for Stanley, providing context for his “dream” and presumably hinting at his guilt. One could suggest that Travis is aware of what he’s done, but rather than admit it, he swallows the truth before inevitably succumbing to the virus and infecting his parents.

In a terrible outbreak, like in The Walking Dead franchise or The Last of Us video games, sometimes the scariest monsters come from within us. We never see the “It” that comes at night, but that’s the point. Travis is an unreliable narrator in a film filled with unreliable narrators. Still, his rapidly depleting mental state, his scary artwork, and the recent loss of his grandfather might’ve manifested into an unconscious bout of sleepwalking. Did Travis sleepwalk and go outside, or was he cognizant of his decision? Did he discover something eating Stanley? And did Travis drag Stanley to the porch in an attempt to save him? Also, inconclusive. But one could infer that Travis’ eerie night terrors were merely his subconscious cementing his mounting distrust of Will and Kim, at the behest of his father, or possibly fever dreams brought on by the infection he contracted from Bud or Stanley.

It Comes at Night is a Darwinian psychological thriller about the horrors that come from within all of us when self-preservation and speculation outweigh empathy or rationality. Its ending is purely up to interpretation, for sometimes, an unanswerable mystery is more satisfying than any answerable truth.