It stars Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Riley Keough.

A couple, Paul and Sarah, and their teenage son Travis are secluded in their home deep in the woods in an undisclosed location.

One day, Travis's dog Stanley begins barking aggressively at an unseen presence and chases it into the woods.

Paul suspects Andrew is infected, and decides they should quarantine in their separate rooms to ensure no one is sick.

He insists his family is healthy, repeatedly tells Andrew to keep his eyes shut and orders Paul to remove the mask.

[7] He cites Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1562 oil painting The Triumph of Death as inspiration and it features prominently in the movie and its first trailer.

To the later point, the film takes some influences from The Shining's Overlook Hotel in that the layout of the house is deliberately vague and never properly established.

Deadline Hollywood noted the film's poor audience word-of-mouth led to a drop of potential Saturday and Sunday sales.

The site's critical consensus reads, "It Comes at Night makes lethally effective use of its bare-bones trappings while proving once again that what's left unseen can be just as horrifying as anything on the screen.

"[19] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score 78 out of 100, based on 43 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

[4] Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film a thumbs up, saying "It is a movie in which the villains are loss, grief, pain, fear and distrust — very human emotions — and it has no traditional brain-eaters."

It's a grim vision of a world losing track of objective facts, descending into a poisonous abyss of chaos and disorder.

"[23] David Sims of The Atlantic called it "A fairly straightforward post-apocalyptic story, tightly focused on human torment, but suffused with surprising, undeniably atmospheric sights and sounds.

"[24] Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson was more critical, writing, "without exploring the fullness of the world he's made, all Shults can do is try to shock us with brutality.

Which, sadly, doesn't shock anymore so much as it exhausts us... To my mind, It Comes at Night traffics in a fatally depthless cruelty.