‘It Comes at Night’
Directed by Trey Edward Shults
Starring Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo
Rated R
“It Comes at Night” might be one of the most glum movies ever made.
It is relentlessly, painstakingly, unrelentingly downbeat; so depressing that when some of the characters smile you’re practically terrified.
That probably doesn’t make anyone particularly eager to expend some hard-earned discretionary income on the film, but the brutal emotional experience offered by writer-director Trey Edward Shults (“Krisha”) happens to be wholly authentic and rendered with the sort of grand atmospheric compositions that could only be presented by a cinematic talent.
Set in upstate New York amid a dystopia in which an unexplained virus threatens to transform living beings into twitching rabid zombies, the movie follows the slowly building consequences as a father (Joel Edgerton), mother (Carmen Ejogo) and teenage son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) open their meticulously protected home to a young couple and their toddler.
It’s a genre picture bathed in overwhelming darkness and torment. That’s both in terms of the way the camera lingers on, say, a close-up of Pieter Bruegel’s painting “The Triumph of Death,” or moves slowly through the pitch-black hallways and rooms of this disconsolate world, and in the ways it evokes the heartache eating away at Harrison Jr.’s character, a young man experiencing the hormonal awakening of the teen years at the worst possible time.
