Film #26 — 2/2 Post-Apocalyptic Films
By C. Ramsay
Opening in medias res, with high stakes and no information other than what is directly visible to the audience, It Comes at Night is a drawling, shambling, slow burn of a character study. Surprisingly relevant to the hyper paranoia that has festered since the arrival of COVID-19, the film seeks to escalate by exploiting the uncertainties of the audience and characters alike. We never get much context around what’s happening or why, we only get a vague idea: a disease has ravaged the world, or at least the microcosm accessible to us, and we are introduced to the aftermath through two families and their experiences.
Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death is featured at the beginning of the film, a painting depicting a browning landscape, charred by fire and littered with bodies and their useless earthly possessions. Legions of undead have come to lay waste to people of all classes and backgrounds, whether they accept their fate or vie against it. As with the families we meet, there are options for how they can respond to the threat of death, but there is ultimately no real chance of escape.
The colour palette of the painting—mostly browns, greens to highlight, and vibrant flushes of red—courses through the film, helping to establish a cinematographic style that’s also informed by the framing of the art piece. The house in the film, for example, is jarringly compartmentalized. Its liminal spaces often appear too small for the people moving through them. The rooms are each contained rather than open concept, and even the windows provide only small, regulated views outside. A single entrance/exit fosters a sense of security for the main family as much as it does a sense of impending, inescapable doom. Similarly, though the world outside is much more open, this space is also extremely fragmented. The scenes at night are the most evidently distorted, with darkness being used to envelop nearly everything while only controlled beams of light from windows or flashlights are visible. Daylight is typically framed through windows, doors, and even how the trees are captured within the frame, and when a shot is not wholly constrained, then roots and branches are commonly used to splinter it instead. Everything is mapped to a strict path, but no amount of planning or familiarity can rectify the divergences that will inevitably arise.
The protagonists essentially create a labyrinth of their own destruction, a purgatory running parallel to what they imagine hell to be. The unseen or unidentifiable things that come at night (the symptoms of sickness, an entity, paranoia, fear, desperation, regret, etc.) are to the families all viable possibilities as long as at least one of them remains so. Anxiety and suspicion are boiled to their highest concentrations within the confines of what’s practically the only set in the film. The stakes of maintaining a sense of humanity through blending allegiance to family and to community are high, and doing so in the isolated pressure pot of prolonged panic that’s shown underscores the difficulty of determining who can be trusted with the responsibility of ensuring the wellbeing of others through navigating sickness and impeding death. The answer, it seems, is that such a responsibility can never be entrusted to a single person.
Star rating (/5): ★★★½
Recommend?: Yes