It Comes at Night
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Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son, but this will soon be put to test when a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.
What critics thought
Critics largely admired Trey Edward Shults's slow-burn horror for what it withholds — unseen threats, unanswered questions, and a world deliberately kept off-screen — finding the human fear and mistrust at its center more disturbing than any monster. The real story, though, is the canyon between critics and general audiences, who were far less forgiving of a film that keeps its horrors firmly interior and refuses genre payoffs.
“there are no bad guys here – just suspicion, isolation and contagion. It's a grim vision of a world losing track of objective facts, descending into a poisonous abyss of chaos and disorder. No wonder it strikes such a contemporary chord.”
Mark Kermode·The Observer
“A fairly straightforward post-apocalyptic story, tightly focused on human torment, but suffused with surprising, undeniably atmospheric sights and sounds.”
David Sims·The Atlantic
“without exploring the fullness of the world he's made, all Shults can do is try to shock us with brutality. Which, sadly, doesn't shock anymore so much as it exhausts us... To my mind, It Comes at Night traffics in a fatally depthless cruelty.”
Richard Lawson·Vanity Fair
“It is not unreasonable for an audience to be interested in these questions when our interest is generated by the film itself. In the absence of such answers, or the intimation of such answers, or even of characters in pursuit of answers, It Comes at Night begins to seem thin, a torment without purpose.”
Mick LaSalle·San Francisco Chronicle
Genres
Drama, Horror, Mystery
Cast & Crew
From the studio
It Comes at Night
Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, a man has established a tenuous domestic order with his wife and son, but this will soon be put to test when a desperate young family arrives seeking refuge.
What critics thought
Critics largely admired Trey Edward Shults's slow-burn horror for what it withholds — unseen threats, unanswered questions, and a world deliberately kept off-screen — finding the human fear and mistrust at its center more disturbing than any monster. The real story, though, is the canyon between critics and general audiences, who were far less forgiving of a film that keeps its horrors firmly interior and refuses genre payoffs.
“there are no bad guys here – just suspicion, isolation and contagion. It's a grim vision of a world losing track of objective facts, descending into a poisonous abyss of chaos and disorder. No wonder it strikes such a contemporary chord.”
Mark Kermode·The Observer
“A fairly straightforward post-apocalyptic story, tightly focused on human torment, but suffused with surprising, undeniably atmospheric sights and sounds.”
David Sims·The Atlantic
“without exploring the fullness of the world he's made, all Shults can do is try to shock us with brutality. Which, sadly, doesn't shock anymore so much as it exhausts us... To my mind, It Comes at Night traffics in a fatally depthless cruelty.”
Richard Lawson·Vanity Fair
“It is not unreasonable for an audience to be interested in these questions when our interest is generated by the film itself. In the absence of such answers, or the intimation of such answers, or even of characters in pursuit of answers, It Comes at Night begins to seem thin, a torment without purpose.”
Mick LaSalle·San Francisco Chronicle
Genres
Drama, Horror, Mystery
Cast & Crew
From the studio
Stream
Rent & Buy