You may think you’ve seen every variation of the post-apocalyptic horror genre under the sun, and there’s a distinct chance that sentiment isn’t too far wide of the mark, but It Comes at Night managed to put an eerily atmospheric and unflinching fresh coat of paint on a premise that’s becoming increasingly harder to reinvent.
What makes it even more impressive is that writer and director Trey Edward Shults was only 28 years old when his second feature released to rave reviews in June 2017, where it would go on to earn $20 million at the box office on a budget of under $5 million, notching an 87 percent Rotten Tomatoes score in the process.
However, the user rating is virtually cut in half at a surprisingly low 44 percent, with some gorehounds left disappointed that the film they ended up getting wasn’t quite the same as the one they’d been promised by the marketing. Paramount Plus subscribers don’t seem to mind, though, with It Comes at Night scoring multiple Top 10 placings on the platform around the world, cracking the global Top 20 as a result (per FlixPatrol).
The story unfolds in the wake of a devastating contagion that decimated the human population, with survivors doing everything they can just to survive. Two families end up bunking together and forming an alliance that could be called tenuous at best, only to soon discover that there’s evil lurking both in and outside the walls of the place they call home, slapping some existentialism onto a white-knuckle example of how leaving the danger unseen is often ten times scarier than flowing geysers of blood.