It Comes at Night (2017)'s comments

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Siskoid

I'm not sure it does It Comes At Night credit to be marketed as a horror film - some will avoid it based on that false premise - but judging by the title, that may be part of the game writer-director Trey Edward Shults wants to play. What we get is a taut paranoid thriller that often feels like a zombie picture, but is really about an apocalyptic plague and the resulting fear. We follow a survivalist family living in the woods who feels obligated to help another, or rather, and this helps with the paranoia, we follow the family's teenage son, whose perceptions are partial at best. As are everyone's. The film revels in the not-quite-seen and the ambiguity of characters' motivations. Are we seeing what we think we're seeing, or is our imagination getting the better of us. It Comes at Night puts us in the characters' heads better than most films do, pushing our own paranoid buttons through neo-Gothic imagery, vivid nightmares, and the withholding of crucial information.

6 years 11 months ago

HellOui

As someone else here commented on, I think this is an good example of bad marketing and a hackneyed title hurting a film. Very good critical reviews, good imdb score, lots of likes here, but bad RT audience score, bad CinemaScore, and ended up not making much money. All the marketing and the title made me think it was some sort of jump-scare horror or zombie movie, but it's not. If you go in with no expectations and an open mind I think you'll enjoy it as I did.

6 years 8 months ago

KarlHungus

I'm gonna have to do some thinking with this one. I believe there is some very deep metaphorical stuff going on in this film that I am probably too unsophisticated to decipher. Anyways, this film affected me in ways I couldn't have foreseen. When the lights came on at the end, I felt like I had awoken from a nightmarish dream. This is unlike anything I (personally) have seen before. If you asked me to rate it an hour after seeing it I would give it an 8.5/10

6 years 11 months ago

DJPowWow

Really glad I saw this with no pre-conceived notions about what this film was about... I didn't see any trailers for it, and had only heard through word-of-mouth that it was a decent thriller. From what I can tell from others, a lot of people were expecting a typical horror film, which did not work in its favor. I've seen this happen with other movies as well (2006's Bug and 2014's The Babadook both immediately come to mind, as neither one could really be considered "traditional" horror films, yet were largely advertised as such and suffered with larger audiences for it).
Very well-crafted and haunting, it's almost meditative in the ways it plays with themes of paranoia and the break-down of society and family in times of desperation. It reminded me at times of 2015's Maggie, which had a similar contemplative and slow pace to it, though that one was more focused on themes of grief rather than paranoia, and had an actual zombie apocalypse as its setting rather than the undefined plague ravaging the survivors in It Comes at Night.

6 years 7 months ago