Possessor, the second feature from Canadian filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg, is a well crafted, but curiously unengaging psychological thriller.
Christopher Abbott
The psychological thriller It Comes at Night reeks of maximum effort for minimal gain. It tries so desperately hard to be artful, profound, and scary that it manages to fail at all three spectacularly, mistaking ambiguous floundering for subtextual depth, creative lighting schemes for tension, and po-faced seriousness for substance. The second feature film from American writer-director Trey Edward Shults (following Krisha, one of last year’s most underrated efforts) is rigorously composed to within an inch of its stifled, stuffy, overwrought life and for little more than a bog standard post-apocalyptic narrative that’s indistinguishable from many similar narratives that dot the straight-to-VOD wastelands.