Everything adds to the tension in “It Comes at Night,” including the stellar sound design and the playful use of changing aspect ratios, as the perspective shrinks to clarify when Travis is having a bad dream … maybe.
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Even when the action opens up to the woods outdoors, they find ways to capture the natural light coming through the trees in a way that never pretentiously calls attention to itself but adds to the tension.
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Working with a fantastic production design team, they ground “It Comes at Night” in a tactile world-you can smell the wood that makes up the house and feel the grime on their skins. Working at a peak of atmospheric horror rarely seen in only a second film, Shults and his ace cinematographer Drew Daniels (who also shot “Krisha”) create captivating visuals with in-scene light sources throughout “It Comes at Night,” from the dim illumination of a lantern to the harsh glare of a flashlight on the end of a gun. And yet there’s something about their story that doesn’t quite add up. After a bit of a terrifying scuffle, they discover that their invader is named Will ( Christopher Abbott), and he’s just looking for water for his family, wife Kim ( Riley Keough) and son Andrew ( Griffin Robert Faulkner), who are in another abandoned house 50 miles away. Shortly after the burning of grandpa’s body, the family awakens to a sound in the “airlock room” between the two never-to-be-opened doors.
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If they need to go outside for any reason, they go in pairs, and they never go out at night. Every window in the house is boarded up and there’s only one way out, through two locked doors, one of which has been painted bright red. Father Paul ( Joel Edgerton) has very strict rules that are uniformly obeyed by son Travis ( Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and mother Sarah ( Carmen Ejogo). Shults is very careful in the way he parses out bits of information about the world in which “It Comes at Night” takes place, even though almost the entirety of the action unfolds in a boarded-up house and the woods that surround it. There are no zombies in the streets, boogeymen in the basement or witches in the woods-and yet it is one of the most terrifying films in years.
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It is a movie in which the villains are loss, grief, pain, fear, and distrust-very human emotions-and it is has no traditional undead brain-eaters. But this is no riff on “The Walking Dead” or “ 28 Days Later.” It’s important that Shults’ vision of the end of the world opens not with an attack but with the kind of event that forever twists the trajectory of a young man’s life: the death of a loved one. Your body bruises, your eyes go black, you puke blood.
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Trey Edward Shults’ second film-after the remarkable breakthrough of “ Krisha” last year-takes place in a world ravaged by a horrendous disease, the kind of thing that kills you in a day and has left survivors scrounging for food and trusting no one. Did I mention they’re all wearing gas masks? From the beginning, confusion and loss reign in a film designed to keep you uncertain and emotionally raw. An older gentleman, who is clearly very ill, says goodbye to his family and then gets shot in the head before his son-in-law and grandson burn his body. Like a lot of horror movies, “It Comes at Night” opens with a death.