Festival Predictions

2017 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night

Published on November 25, 2016

While luck and talent go hand in hand, you might want to ask Trey Edward Shults to pick out lottery numbers for all the early good fortune he has run into. From being an intern on The Tree of Life, and being a fly on the wall on projects such as Midnight Special and Malick’s Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey and the upcoming Weightless, Shults paved the way for his own success when Krisha shook up SXSW (lassoed the Special Jury and Audience awards) and the Croisette and essentially brought distributor A24 into the producing sphere, picking up his debut film and backing his sophomore feature. With principal photography beginning in August, the only way for It Comes at Night to get into Sundance is via some special hall pass. Stranger things have happened. The horror mystery includes Joel Edgerton, Riley Keough, Christopher Abbott, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Selma actress Carmen Ejogo.

Gist: Edgerton will play a father who will stop at nothing to protect his wife and son from a malevolent, mysterious presence terrorizing them right outside their doorstep.

Production Co./Producers: Animal Kingdom’s David Kaplan (It Follows) along with Andrea Roa (Unexpected)

Prediction: Chalk this up in the Park City at Midnight section or, they could wait until a showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

U.S. Distributor: A24 (domestic). TBD (international)

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Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).