Director: Trey Edward Shults
Runtime: 97 minutes
Clear-cut answers are hard to come by in It Comes at Night. A catastrophe of some sort, manifesting in the form of a bubonic plague-esque infection, has done its damage. And based on the boarded up home of the main characters, it seems that people aren't too keen on socializing outside of their family. The story opens with a mercy killing, the kind we've seen in any number of post-apocalyptic films and TV shows. But what follows, despite some eventual bloodletting, is hardly standard issue fare. Despite the looming sense of the unknown, the film is ultimately a chamber drama that happens to unfold in a nightmarish scenario. What need is there for answers to big questions when uncertainty is sitting right next to you at the dinner table?
Any given festival circuit is full of splashy debut features. Trey Edward Shults had his at last year's Sundance, with the nervy psychological drama Krisha. Despite its shoe-string budget, the film did what any cinematic calling card should do: introduce potential. Following up on said potential is another matter entirely. For Houston-born Shults, however, lightning has actually managed to strike twice. If anything, it has struck with even more intensity than before. It Comes at Night retains the strengths of Krisha, while applying them to a more established budget and a cast of professional performers. But the film is not exactly a major leap forward for Shults, though this is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it's a lateral move, taking on similar issues and themes, but merely restating them in a new setting and with newfound luxury. It may seem like overkill to attempt a second impression after your first went over so well, but in the end, Shults' sophomore effort more than justifies itself.
It Comes at Night does not immediately register as a work derived from personal experience. With its apocalyptic setting, genre demands appear to be at the forefront of the film's concerns (they're certainly behind the marketing campaign). But despite the long shots of a camera gliding down a dark hallway and some gory dream sequences, Shults' film is anything but predictable. There are trace elements of what we would expect from this sort of scenario (blood dripping from a mouth, the ravages of a horrific infection, things going bump in the night), and they are indeed disturbing. But all of that pales in comparison to what It Comes at Night pulls off in its final act, which is a bleak, bruising, and haunting as anything in recent memory.
The mercy killing that opens the film is not that of an acquaintance or ally, but of a father and grandfather. It is a death hastened out of necessity, but one that also reduces a household from a family of four to a family of three. There is magnitude in this kind of loss. Each person in the house now has one person fewer to rely on. Or talk to. Or laugh with. And so it's no surprise that when Paul (Joel Edgerton), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and their son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) encounter a new person, they immediately go on edge.
The new person in question is Will (Christopher Abbott), caught as he tries to break in to Paul and Sarah's home for food and supplies. Like Paul, Will is a husband and father. His wife and child (Riley Keough and Griffin Faulkner) are 15 miles away, and desperately waiting for him to return. "Have you seen anyone else?" asks Paul. "No," says Will. He could be telling the truth. He could be lying. If it's the latter, what might he be concealing? It Comes at Night rarely answers questions, even when you might beg for it to give just a shred of evidence in either direction. But in Shults' capable hands, it matters gravely to the characters, but doesn't hinder engagement for the viewer.
Initially, the films seems lopsided in structure. After the ominous beginning, Shults dials down the dread and suspense, and punctures the mood with bits of levity and charm. One montage is (relatively) joyous, observing two different families working and learning together. You'd be forgiven for thinking that Shults had forgotten what type of story he was telling. But the film's steadily unnerving progression ultimately reveals that Shults and his collaborators have known precisely how to play this all from the get go. No matter how innocent or kind a person seems, few things arouse suspicion like a story that fails to fully add up. All it takes is one stray remark, and the atmosphere in the house undergoes an irrevocable shift.
Aided by a dynamic score (by Brian McOmber) and claustrophobic photography, Shults is able to conjure up a feeling of imminent disaster that could plausibly stem from supernatural or mundane sources. The ramifications of either are terrifying. If there is some boogeyman out there, then the world is even more frightening than we thought. If it's something totally normal, then it only illustrates how far humanity has fallen. An early scene involves a montage of closeups of a print of Bruegel the Elder's "Triump of Death," filled with images both surreal and ordinary. They exist side by side, feeding into each other. Is there really some singular entity out there to fear? It doesn't matter. The mere notion that there could be is all it takes for paranoia to spread.
Grade: A-
Director: Ava DuVernay
Runtime: 104 minutes
It seems unthinkable that a figure like Martin Luther King Jr. hasn't been the center of a major film until this year. If Hollywood can greenlight a movie about the woman who invented Tupperware, surely they can make room for one of the most iconic activists in history. After much needless back and forth (because apparently vast sections of the industry see Martin Luther friggin' King as a subject with slim appeal), King has finally be granted his moment in the cinematic sunlight. Yet unlike so many historical biopics, Ava DuVernay's Selma opts for a limited focus, which only magnifies its emotional and intellectual power. In confining her film to a period of six months, Selma achieves what decades-spanning historical dramas wish they could do.
DuVernay's previous two features, including 2012's excellent Middle of Nowhere, have always been intimate, so it's no surprise to see her avoid a purposefully epic scope. And yet what she has pulled off with Selma is thrillingly expansive as it unpacks the myriad angles of the later stages of the Civil Rights Movement. Selma only covers the run up and duration of King's march from Selma to Montgomery, but the film still feels like a comprehensive drama without turning into a history lecture.
The most obvious comparison that springs to mind is Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, a film that also deconstructed an iconic figure. Selma, like Lincoln (which went behind the scenes of the 13th Amendment's passage), opts for humanity rather than hagiography. Dr. King (David Oyelowo) gives his share of rousing speeches, but DuVernay is more interested in picking apart the reasons behind King's speeches and his leadership. Co-written by Paul Webb (DuVernay did a second draft but was, sadly, not able to earn her own credit as a writer), Selma is at its finest when it portrays King as a shrewd, media-savvy tactician. King is met with hesitation by Pres. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), and must take matters into his own hands to keep the Civil Rights Movement in the limelight. Having already delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech and won the Nobel Peace Prize, King sees that it's going to take more to grab the attention of the public and the White House to make meaningful change across the country.
Selma opening scenes feel a bit stale, and they represent the most traditional aspects of the story. But once King's movement relocates to Selma, Alabama for the next stage of their fight, DuVernay's direction blossoms. In one of King's speeches, he remarks that there are intersections of history and injustice where action is the only option for the oppressed and the marginalized. This would be an important point in any year, but the timing of the film's release causes this sentiment to register two-fold. The march to Montgomery was the action of the moment, and Selma has proven to be the film of the moment. DuVernay's staging and shooting of the police brutality against the march is plenty harrowing as a historical dramatization, but it also acts as a solemn reminder of how slowly things have progressed in the decades since.
Though King is undoubtedly the story's anchor, Webb and DuVernay cover an impressive amount of territory without contriving unnecessary subplots. The scenes at the White House lend a complexity to Pres. Johnson and his mixed feelings about how to help King despite the "101 issues" he's also dealing with. Wilkinson starts off a bit cartoonish, but over the course of the narrative he emerges as a fully-formed character. Also quite removed from the central plot is Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), but the script never forgets her. The film only touches on King's infidelities once, but the scene is a masterclass of dramatic tension and subtlety centered on Ejogo and Oyelowo's powerhouse performances. Even one-off scenes, like Malcolm X's (Nigel Thatch) encounter with Coretta, are inserted with intelligence and restraint that bolsters, rather than distracts from, King's development.
The film wouldn't be complete, however, without a solid leading man. Oyelowo is more than up to the task of capturing King and making him a multifaceted, flawed leader. Even when he speaks, often with great force, to his followers, Oyelowo's performance never devolves into hollow theatrics. Recent events lend an added context to Selma, but King's speeches (DuVernay doesn't have the rights to the originals, and had to create her own) are tremendously powerful and inspiring.
With such sensitive subject matter, Selma could have easily become manipulative in its historical recreations. Yet the most moving moments in the story come from characters we barely know, like a young protester (Short Term 12's Keith Stanfield) viciously targeted after standing up to Sheriff Jim Clark (Stan Houston). The specific tragedies that befall members of the Civil Rights Movement are just as impactful as King's actions, and lend an even greater emotional weight to Selma's narrative.
Ironically, the only times when Selma stumbles are when DuVernay tries to shoe-horn in more "modern" filmmaking techniques. In one instance, as protester Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey) is slammed to the ground by police, the film cuts to a shot where it looks as though the camera has been mounted on top of the character, following her movements with an off-putting stillness that undercuts the chaos of the scenario. In another scene, slow motion is used to capture the death of a minor character hitting the ground with a thud, and it looks like something out of a boxing movie. There's a distracting artifice to these brief snippets that seems at odd with the rest of Selma's naturalistic, deep-in-the-trenches visual approach.
Ultimately, these are minor quibbles in an otherwise gripping and insightful drama. DuVernay has said that she doesn't usually care for historical dramas, but she sure as hell proves that she knows how to make a good one. Selma is topical and noteworthy for a whole host of reasons, but none of these should get in the way for praising the film's legitimate artistic merits. Selma's skillful integration of scenes beyond its setting have a way of opening the story and magnifying its impact without straining to be something more. With her third feature, DuVernay has not only made a powerful and socially-conscious drama that registers far beyond its limited scope as it caps off a dynamic year for films written and directed by black artists (and, notably, black women). In striving for intimacy, she has created an unintentional epic that, like King's legacy, is about more than simply having a dream.
Grade: B+/A-
