It Comes at Night

IT COMES AT NIGHT (Trey Edward Shults, 2017)

A contagious disease has forced those who have survived so far to hole up in their homes, preferably far removed from the rest of society in IT COMES AT NIGHT. The family led by Paul (Joel Edgerton) and Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) has managed to make do in the country, but when her father (David Pendleton) catches the illness, they know they must euthanize him if the rest are to live. It’s a difficult thing for their seventeen-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to help with. Still, what must be done must be done.

One night they find that a man has broken into their home. Will (Christopher Abbott) claims that he thought the place was abandoned and is seeking water for his wife Kim (Riley Keough) and their little boy Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Paul roughs up Will and considers killing him. Eventually he agrees that it may be safer to retrieve Will’s family and their supplies and have them move in as long as they agree to the strict rules of the house.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults treated the searing family drama of his debut KRISHA like a horror movie. With IT COMES AT NIGHT he’s made a horror film featuring two families. While his latest may have more surface commonalities with genre films, both films study the dynamics in a closed system when tensions run high. In IT COMES AT NIGHT the stakes are elevated to matters of life and death rather than feelings and relationships. Of course, the latter can feel like the former among relatives.

In spite of its narrative and scenic asceticism, IT COMES AT NIGHT generates a fair amount of uneasiness. Shults doesn’t provide many details about the doomsday scenario the characters exist in, but he keeps the audience keenly aware that the smallest break from protocol could have fatal results. The suffocation is felt as the camera slowly wanders down a dark passage in the house and into a heavily wooded area. Shults understands that living in persistent dread is perhaps worse than terrible things popping out at you on occasion.

Although the spareness of IT COMES AT NIGHT is undeniably effective, it reaches a limit where the lack of detail becomes more frustrating than rewarding. The film doesn’t need a news report to fill in a lot of backstory about how things have devolved to current conditions, but it would help to have a better sense of the immediate threats and how the characters might keep the most pernicious one--the disease--at bay. If Shults is commenting on the insular and potentially damaging nature of families, then the film needs a stronger point of view. It’s aligned with Travis, who is at an age when, under normal conditions, he would be able to start establishing an identity separate from his parents. That can’t really happen when it’s everyone or every unit for themselves. Travis is exhibiting signs that he is developing different opinions, but IT COMES AT NIGHT doesn’t develop this angle enough for it to be fruitful.

Keeping everything cloaked in generality grants assigning all sort of meaning to what little action there is, yet the sinking feeling in IT COMES AT NIGHT is that the mystery amounts to less than the scraps examined for clarity.

Grade: C+

The Purge: Anarchy

THE PURGE: ANARCHY (James DeMonaco, 2014)

In THE PURGE: ANARCHY America prepares for the sixth annual event in which virtually all crime, including murder, is legal for a twelve-hour period. The New Founding Fathers credit the Purge as a release valve for bringing unemployment below five percent and improving the country, but those who do not wish to participate and are unable to afford sufficient protection spend 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. once a year hoping to survive.

Married couple on the rocks Shane and Liz (Zach Gilford and Kiele Sanchez) face more pressing problems when their car breaks down as the countdown to the start of the Purge approaches. Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo) wishes for a quiet night holed up in her apartment with her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul) and father (John Beasley), but she and Cali are forced into the street when armed men come to take them away. Sergeant (Frank Grillo) intends to use this night of sanctioned killing to get his revenge on the man responsible for his son’s death.

When Sergeant sees Eva and Cali in danger, he decides to come to their rescue. He returns to his car to find Shane and Liz cowering inside. Sergeant doesn’t want to be the protector of four strangers, but with gunfire making his car nonfunctional, he strikes a temporary bargain with them. He will take them to shelter at Eva’s friend’s home as long as she convinces her friend to give Sergeant her car.

THE PURGE: ANARCHY opens up the action more than its predecessor, which took place almost entirely in a single home under attack, yet the sequel is plagued by similar problems in THE PURGE. This thriller lacks suspense and horror, except for the occasional shocking image. Writer-director James DeMonaco establishes a disturbing premise in these films but fails to generate much tension from moment to moment. It’s a strange shortcoming in a film universe in which no one and nowhere is potentially safe.

Built on a federal observance that breeds class warfare, THE PURGE: ANARCHY touches a nerve yet never flirts with getting as dark as the circumstances could present. In words and deeds SNOWPIERCER revealed the actions taken in horrid living conditions while THE PURGE: ANARCHY tends to frame an ironic tableau and move along before things get too unsettling. The nihilistic fury running through THE PURGE: ANARCHY feels particular to the time yet is kept at arm’s length lest it rile up anyone who might latch onto a radical idea or those who would denounce it as artistically irresponsible.

DeMonaco questions how leaders pit the have-nots against each other and how conditions allow the wealthy, depicted here just short of looking like the facially distorted suburbanites in Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” video, to exploit the disadvantaged. While THE PURGE: ANARCHY hints at the delicate fabric holding society together, it doesn’t delve deeper into issues regarding the vulnerability of women and the need for constant politeness when causing offense can be answered with permissible vengeance. Perhaps THE PURGE: ANARCHY would be more potent if it didn’t seem like little more than late night freshman dorm-level philosophizing applied to a middling genre picture. It’s probably for the best that DeMonaco doesn’t go into great detail about the Purge because the whole thing starts to crumble upon closer inspection. THE PURGE: ANARCHY’s illicit rush is as fleeting as its ideas.

Grade: C