I Would Like to See It: It Comes at Night

That American society cannot weather a respiratory pandemic is no longer something that can take an audience by surprise. Even so, the bleak, spare, tightly-built engine of Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night feels imperative rather than obsolete, digging its fingers into the paper-thin connective tissue joining neighbor to neighbor, father to son, and so on in the fast-decaying corpse of America’s empire. Its focus on the brittle, nihilistic nature of whiteness and of the idea of the American nuclear family around which that whiteness has congealed is harrowing, opening with a middle-aged white man shooting his black father-in-law to prevent the spread of a mysterious illness and delving deeper and deeper into America’s lack of social cohesion with each passing moment.

How does Paul (Joel Edgerton) express concern for his son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.)? Shouting. Curses. Physical control. How do both he and Will (Christopher Abbott) react to the slightest sign of conflict? By arming themselves and reaffirming the separation between their families. The emotional tools at their disposal, the ones their culture has taught them to value and to turn to in crisis, are antithetical to their survival as a whole. Everything about their identities is predicated on the idea that groups must be separate and that the exterior world consists solely of threats, that an imaginary species of cold, ruthless logic is the only way to survive disaster. It’s hard not to think of the fascist blood-and-soil power fantasies of media like The Walking Dead, in which zombies function as a kind of moral shield for whatever viciousness white men dream of inflicting on the people around them. It Comes at Night reveals that fantasy for the hollow, violent triviality it is.

So much goes unsaid in Shults’ film. The origins of the plague, the inconsistencies in the story Will tells Paul about his family’s life since civilization’s collapse, the monstrous sounds Travis hears when his dog vanishes into the woods — these things exist primarily as ambient pressure to heighten the film’s focus on the attitudes of the two families. Each character is sketched with such efficient detail that by the time relations among them begin to collapse it’s impossible to unpick specific feelings or sympathies from the emotional tangle. Perhaps the single most poignant detail in a film full of artfully observed moments of love, longing, imagination, and trust is that by the time things go wrong the entire house is already doomed. They turn on each other in a pointless, panicky flurry of “logical” violence, poisoning their last hours on earth with appalling acts and desolate, morally hollow rationalizations. The most astonishing thing about It Comes at Night is that it wasn’t made yesterday.