The Apocalypse Is Here, and It’s Boring
Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night wants to be a psychological horror masterpiece about fear, paranoia, and the decay of humanity. What it is, unfortunately, is 91 minutes of watching people argue in a dark cabin about whether or not they’re going to catch a cold. The title promises terror, suspense, maybe even a monster. What actually comes at night? Nothing. Not a damn thing. Not even an explanation.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of ordering a steak and getting a plate of existential dread with a garnish of bad lighting. You sit there waiting for something to happen — a reveal, a twist, a payoff — but all you get is a slow slide into depression and maybe a mild nap. A24 has made some brilliant horror movies, but this one feels like it escaped from an art student’s thesis project titled Fear Is a Doorway to Nowhere (feat. Joel Edgerton’s Beard).
The End of the World, Sponsored by LED Flashlights
The setup sounds promising on paper: a deadly plague has wiped out civilization, and a small family is holed up in the woods trying to survive. When strangers show up, paranoia sets in. Will they trust each other? Will they kill each other? Will someone, please for the love of God, turn on a light?
The answer to all of the above is “sort of.”
Joel Edgerton plays Paul, a man so committed to survival that he apparently forgot how to feel human emotion. He spends most of the film glaring at everyone like a guy who just found out someone touched his canned beans. His wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) do their best to look terrified, but mostly they look tired — possibly because they’ve been living under Shults’ color palette of “permanent dusk.”
Then there’s the other family: Will (Christopher Abbott), Kim (Riley Keough), and their young son Andrew. They show up looking for water and shelter, and for a brief, blissful moment, you think maybe the story’s about to start. Instead, everyone spends an hour sitting around the dinner table talking about trust like they’re in a post-apocalyptic therapy session.
It Comes at Night, But the Plot Took a Nap
The movie’s biggest crime is that nothing happens. It teases, it hints, it broods — oh, how it broods — but it never delivers. Every time you think something supernatural is about to show up, the film smugly winks and whispers, “Actually, it’s a metaphor.”
A metaphor for what? Paranoia? Family breakdown? The human condition? Take your pick. The movie gives you just enough material to write a high school essay about “themes of mistrust in confined spaces,” but not enough to justify the ticket price.
Even the mysterious “it” from the title never materializes. “It” might be fear. Or guilt. Or the director’s refusal to hire a script editor. Whatever “it” is, “it” certainly doesn’t come at night. Nothing does. There’s one scary dog, a few bad dreams, and a lot of heavy breathing in dark hallways. If this is the apocalypse, I’ll take my chances outside.
The World’s Most Depressing Sleepover
Travis, the teenage son, spends most of the movie wandering around with a lantern like he’s searching for a plot. He has nightmares about his dead grandfather, a bleeding dog, and maybe his own repressed hormones — it’s hard to tell, because the movie refuses to distinguish between dream sequences and reality. The editing is so vague it feels like the audience might be suffering from the infection too.
The dog, Stanley, actually gets the most character development of anyone in the film. He barks at something unseen in the woods, disappears, and later reappears sick — the only genuinely unsettling moment in the whole story. Naturally, they kill and burn him, because God forbid anything interesting live long enough to explain the plot.
After that, the movie degenerates into a series of whispery confrontations about who left the door open. The open door is apparently the central mystery of the entire apocalypse. Forget zombies, forget aliens, forget the plague — the real horror is an unlocked deadbolt.
The Sound of Paranoia (and Silence)
One of the most frustrating things about It Comes at Night is how well it’s made. The cinematography by Drew Daniels is gorgeous in a grim, desaturated way. The camera floats like a ghost through hallways drenched in shadows, and the score hums with quiet dread. It’s like watching a funeral for the concept of fun.
Every technical element screams “serious cinema.” You can almost hear A24 executives clinking glasses of craft whiskey and saying, “We made horror respectable.” But respectability doesn’t equal satisfaction. By the fifth slow pan of a character staring into nothing, you start rooting for the disease to win.
Everyone Dies, No One Learns Anything
The film builds up a tense standoff between the two families, which could have been explosive. Instead, it’s just… sad. Not the kind of sad that moves you — the kind that makes you question your life choices. Everyone starts pointing guns at each other, a child might be infected, and before you can even brace yourself, it’s over.
The climax happens so fast it feels like the editor had a dentist appointment. A few shots ring out, there’s some yelling, a kid dies, and then credits. The emotional gut punch never lands because the film spent too long whispering about fear and not enough time giving you anyone to care about.
The final image — two parents sitting in silence, infected and dead inside, staring at the table — feels like the director’s subtle way of saying, “You too are now dead inside for watching this.”
The Real Monster Was the Screenplay
The marketing promised something terrifying — an unseen creature, maybe, or a supernatural plague. Instead, It Comes at Night is an art-house dirge about how mistrust ruins families. Which would be fine if it didn’t treat its audience like grad students auditing Existentialism 101.
There’s a fine line between ambiguity and emptiness, and Shults pole-vaults over it. The film mistakes withholding information for building tension. By the end, you don’t feel scared — you feel duped. It’s like someone handed you a locked box labeled “Terror” and then refused to give you the key, insisting the real horror was the idea of the box.
A24: The Horror Studio That Cried Wolf
To be fair, It Comes at Night isn’t without craft. It’s well-acted, tightly directed, and thematically ambitious. But so is a refrigerator commercial if you shoot it in dim lighting and add a cello score.
Joel Edgerton tries his best to carry the film’s moral weight, but all the brooding in the world can’t save a script that’s allergic to payoffs. Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough give strong performances too, but they’re trapped in a movie where emotion is rationed like canned beans. By the end, everyone looks ready to die — and honestly, same.
Final Verdict: Nothing Comes at Night — Not Even a Plot
In the end, It Comes at Night is less a horror movie and more a mood — specifically, the mood of realizing you’ve wasted a perfectly good Friday night watching people distrust each other in 4K.
It’s a film that wants to scare you but settles for confusing you. It wants to explore humanity’s darkness but ends up exploring how long you can stare at a hallway before losing consciousness.
Rating: 2 out of 10 unlocked doors.
One point for cinematography. One point for the dog. Everything else should have stayed quarantined.
