"It Comes at Night", The fear of not being able to trust in others.

Contractualism is a philosophical current that seeks to explain how people accept losing certain freedoms in exchange for security. The clearest example being the laws that the State is responsible for enforcing. But what happens when this pact between people is broken?

“It Comes at Night” begins with a family living secluded in the woods as a deadly virus attacks. Then one day a man enters the house saying that he thought it was empty and that he came in looking for water for his family. And this is when moral dilemmas begin to arise.

While they have the man tied to a tree, the family debates: Is he telling the truth? What happens if he is with other people and when they release him he returns to rob them? If his story is true, letting him die would be letting three people die.

They finally decide to have the man and his family move in with them. This was a smart decision, this way they not only avoided being paranoid about the fact that he already know where they live but also became a larger group with the advantages that this entails. As there are more people, they will be able to defend themselves better if someone attacks them, build things and mix their resources in a more profitable way. But in a context of social crisis, being able to trust is almost impossible. In general, the young boy in the family is happy with the guests, but his parents know that desperate people are capable of anything.

The entire movie is pure tension, but once the family arrives at the house it increases exponentially. It's clear that something is going to happen: Are resources going to run out and guests going to betray them? Are they going to get tired of Joel Edgerton's character imposing all the rules? Is the boy (who has very raging hormones) going to be with Kim (Riley Keough) and ruin the minimal trust that exists in the house?

Furthermore, as if this tension were not enough, families have to endure a constant fear of someone coming with bad intentions and of the virus that is capable of killing in one day. If it makes me stressed just to see it, I don't want to imagine how stressful it would be to live that way in constant paranoia. Although in our society there are many people who do not abide by the laws (especially in Latin America), this story makes one appreciate that these and morality exist, and that people abide by them.

Although the film is from 2017, today it is impossible not to think about the covid pandemic when watching it. On what would have happened if it had been much more lethal. This possibility scares me more than most horror movies.

The film invites us to think what we would do in a similar situation, could we believe in people outside our family? In that sense it reminds me of "Leave the World Behind", where we also had two families having to decide whether to trust each other while an apocalypse was happening outside. But this one certainly doesn't reach anywhere near the tension levels of “It Comes at Night”, partly because of the tone and partly because of the absence of a lethal danger lurking ( the disease).

Finally, the question that remains after viewing is: if this social pact that contractualism speaks of were broken, would we be able to go back over time? The scary truth is that probably don't.