With Krisha, Trey Edward Shults made something often resembling horror out of the most everyday of stories: a botched Thanksgiving turkey catalyzing the unleashing of some emotional family baggage. That movie used dizzying and unsettling cinematography to visualize its central character’s alienation within her family. But now, with his new film, It Comes At Night — and its just released trailer — it looks like the director is applying a similar aesthetic life to actual horror. (Drew Daniels, the Krisha cinematographer, returns for this film.)
With Joel Edgerton (Loving, Midnight Special), Carmen Ejogo (The Girlfriend Experience, Selma), Riley Keough (The Girlfriend Experience, American Honey), and Christopher Abbott (Girls, James White), the film also diverges from Shults’ debut in that the actors aren’t just members of his family, acting astonishingly well. As Entertainment Weekly notes, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s horrifying painting The Triumph of Death also stars in the trailer.
Distributor A24 released a description:
Imagine the end of the world. Now imagine something worse. It Comes at Night follows a man (Joel Edgerton) as he learns that the evil stalking his family home may be only a prelude to horrors that come from within.
Apparently there’s some overarching ill currently antagonizing the rest of human existence, and Edgerton’s character’s family has sheltered themselves from it in a home in the woods. Another couple shows up seeking shelter, and, as tensions escalate, that’s when the character starts awakening to said “horrors that come from within” him.
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