"It Comes At Night" is Coming to Scare You

Chris here. While yesterday’s trailer for Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled certainly rattled us, here’s another first look to give you the more terrified kind of chills: Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha follow-up, It Comes At Night.

Shults’ first film was a decidedly homegrown effort, but this looks to be a spooky step up in scale and ambition if no less psychologically taxing. The director has also assembled an intriguing cast with Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, and Christopher Abbott. The trailer keeps the specifics of this post-apocalyptic vision under wraps, but hints at some kind of malevolent force at play while Shults continues to mine tense family dynamics. From the opening shot of the trailer alone, we can probably bet this will be one of the year's most formiddable horror films.

Krisha was one of last year’s many promising directorial debuts (even if it had been kicking around for a while). Considering it played the Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes, might Night be heading to the Croisette in some form as well? It Comes At Night opens on August 25.

Krisha Deliriously Dares You Not To Spill The Turkey

Nothing just moves in Trey Edward Shults’ disorienting debut Krisha; it sloshes, slips, tackles, and caws. A dizzying symphony of brain-clattering sound, feverishly unhinged camerawork, and a tightknit, ink-blotter ensemble led by the ferocious Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ get the family together for Thanksgiving drama shoots you right off your seat and holds you hostage over the darkest edge of the human id. Red onions notoriously make you weep but under Shults’ rack-focus eye, they make you want to hurl too. Such portent may lead one to expect a draining, inhumane slog through the mud.

But that alone would be far too easy. This is an exhilarating hostage situation, not just by witnessing a filmmaker’s virtuosic warp over cinematic language but also by the hot cohesion of its richly observed and highly specific setting, and the barbed black comedy that comes along with it. It feels like home, which is to say, Krisha is the waking nightmare of reckoning yourself against the eyes and ears that know you best, a big hug from your aunt that just may choke you from the inside out.

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A New Trailer for "Krisha"

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We hope you're having a safe and festive holiday. Hopefully, you're at least having an easier go of it than Krisha.

Set over the Thanksgiving holiday, Krisha follows its titular prodigal mother as she drops into her family after a years long (and substance induced) absence. Things naturally don't go so well. Just in time for the pumpkin pie, a24's next stunner dropped a new trailer!

Awarded both Grand Jury Winner and Audience Award at SXSW this year, this is no straightforward melodrama, but a consuming dive into both Krisha's fractured psyche and the absurd chaos of a bustling family gathering. I was lucky enough to catch it on the festival circuit earlier this month and was over the moon for Trey Edward Shults's debut. The overall package is far less conventional than the trailer here suggests, with nerve-wrattling sound design and editing giving the film a fiercer bite. Though it was recently nominated for the John Cassavettes Award (for features with a budget below $500,000), I was surprised it didn't show up elsewhere - especially considering what an audacious first feature this is.

And just you wait until you get a look at what star Krisha Fairchild can do. Rarely is a female leading role as taxing and broadly demanding as this (let alone for an unknown), yet she remains unflinching, raw, and fully realized.

Krisha will be released in March 2016, and it belongs at the top of your Most Anticipated lists.