While Get Out still has my vote for best horror film of the year so far, It Comes At Night get’s a more dubious accolade; most misleading marketing. Most of the movie is set during the day, the titular It is refers to a few nightmares experienced by one of the characters, and the doors slamming shut on their own and monsters seemingly hiding in the shadows aren’t in the film at all.
As opposed to the similar titled It Follows S. T. D monster (is the D for demon?) there is no tangible threat referring to the films title. Sure, there are some extended nightmare scenes but to me thats kind of stretching it. No, instead this is one of those horror movies where the monster is actually us all along, men driven to madness through desperation and fear.
Great, that’s fine, that’s dandy, but then please don’t fucking try and sell it to me as a monster flick. Because when it turns out what lies behind that red door featured so heavily in the trailers is nothing at all, and that there was never anything at all to begin with, well that just pisses me off.
Alright, now that my little mini rant is gone, time to move onto the actual movie, which ends up being frankly the most disappointed I’ve been in awhile. While the acting in It Comes At Night deserves some applause (as we have already seen in The Road, Joel Edergton can pull off Apocalyptic like its nobodies business) most everything else, while technically impeccable, is a creative hell hole of unoriginality.
Maybe I’ve just grown weary of post apocalyptic settings. From seven years of The Walking Dead, the unending barrage of video games from the great (The Last of Us) to the terrible (Day Z), and more zombie movies than even the biggest fans of the undead could ever hope to watch, it’s not enough to be well made anymore. You’ve got to do something different.
Here though next to nothing stands out. Groups of paranoid survivors squabble, a disease that kills you in mere days complete with boils and blood puking runs rampant, and, like I said earlier, man turns out to be the real monster all along. Spooky.
I’ll give It Comes props for one thing beyond it’s execution, and thats the ending. Even for a horror movie, its a bleak one. The film begins with a dive headfirst into darkness and never comes up for air. But even still, it’s not an original conclusion, just a more extreme one.
Now even the most self-righteous of horror fans will tell you are beloved genre sometimes can get derivative, but the difference between something like Friday the 13th Part 7 is tone. Friday the 13th knows exactly what it is; a franchise about Jason stabbing horny teenagers.
But It Comes aspires to something larger, which is why it’s failure to rise above the genres tropes stings a little more. I love bleak, unrelenting films, I adore them, but when your going to make your movie without an ounce of self awareness you better be knocking it out of the park. And when people are expecting a home run and you only hit a grounder, well they’re going to notice.
5/10
