It Comes at Night (2017) - Shults' sparse horror leaves too much unanswered

♥♥

+ Worst Movie of the Year

One of the sparse, ominous and very black posters for Trey Edward Shults' It Comes at Night

It Comes at Night is the second feature for writer-director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha (2015)).

A family of three live in a cabin in the woods in a future where a mysterious illness has thrown the world into chaos. As an outsider and his small family come into their lives, they keep self-preservation as their prime objective.

This is a film that has impressed critics, - who are prone to throw superlatives at low-budget indies like this, which wears its refusal to throw light on just about anything in it as an honorary crown, - and antagonized many audiences, who feel let down by a horror that doesn't have as many frightening moments or genre game as they'd thought.
The film features sound performances from Joel Edgerton (The Gift (2015)) and Christopher Abbott (James White (2015)) and a subtle, tense score by Brian McOmber (Krisha). It builds an unpleasant, paranoia-rife atmosphere but it undercuts its prospects by insisting on leaving us in the blank on too many fronts:
SPOILER Who is our protagonist? (I guess the teenage son, who seems the most innocent and sympathetic, but he never does much actively.) What is happening? (The disease is never explained or shown much.) Where do our family come from? (We are almost led to believe that they have always lived in this isolated house in the woods.) Several things concerning the developments in the third act also raise questions, and the film ends leaving us confused; one would be overly forgiving in just labeling it ambiguous.
What the point of the exercise is remains a mystery: Either the film seems to want us to ponder at why we need the spook tales that horror films are in the first place, instead of really committing to being an instance of said tradition itself; or it may also be taken to propose a rather depressing metaphor for an argument that letting anyone into one's life inevitably makes it unravel in tragedy, pain and death. With so many questions unanswered, the bleak ending of the film seems mostly just unpleasant. 
For some reason the family has a famous Pieter Brueghel the Elder painting (The Triumph of Death) hanging on one of their walls, and in the beginning we inspect this with the camera as if it contained an insight into the film itself. It Comes at Night does not live up to its hype, as it is too complacent and deprived of drive and frights, with way too much in it simply blowing in the wind.

2017 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2017 in films - according to Film Excess

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 5 mil. $
Box office: 12 mil. $ and counting
= Too early to say
[It Comes at Night premiered 29 April (Overlook Film Festival, Oregon) and runs 91 minutes. Shooting took place in August 2016 in New York. It opened #6 to a 5.9 mil. $ first weekend in North America. It Comes at Night is certified fresh at 86 % with a 7.4/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of It Comes at Night?