'Coming Home in the Dark' is a perfect midnight feature | Sundance movie review

Coming Home in the Dark follows a family on a road trip in the New Zealand mountains that is isolated and tormented by an unknown assailant

While Coming Home in the Dark doesn’t bring anything new to the thriller genre, it is an anxiety-inducing mean and lean entry that is the perfect kind of Midnight screening at Sundance 2021.

Coming Home in the Dark is like the best of home invasion thrillers — slow-burning, shocking, and continually shifting circumstances — except it’s not set in a home. The movie takes us off a hiking trail and on the road across the New Zealand landscape. If there is a perfect film to screen in the Midnight section of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, it is this one.

The plot is simple. A family is on a road trip to do some hiking in the mountains of New Zealand. There’s father Hoaggie (Erik Thomson), mother Jill (Miriama McDowell), and their two sons. With sweeping vistas captured by cinematographer Matt Henley, it’s clear that the family is alone.

That is until Mandrake (Daniel Gillies) and his quiet sidekick Tubs (Matthias Luafutu) come walking over the ridge towards the picnicking family wielding a powerful rifle and nothing to lose. The entire ordeal, which takes place over a chilling twenty or so minutes is reminiscent of the infamous lake scene in Zodiac or perhaps the eggs scene in Funny Games. It’s restrained, simmering with tension — until it’s not.

Director James Ashcroft, who wrote the film alongside Eli Kent, said at the start of the screening, “I hope it gets under your skin.” And it does. Coming Home in the Dark is built for maximum anxiety-inducing suspense that can turn into violence — though not glorified — at the drop of a hat. That opening scene, one of the best of the fest, is the perfect example of that.

As the story moves from the mountains to a car driving to an unknown location in the dark, the claustrophobic atmosphere becomes all the more apparent thanks to Gillies’ committed and unpredictable performance. However, unlike many other home invasion-inspired movies, Mandrake and Tubs aren’t torturing the family for no reason — like The Strangers’s infamous “because you were home” line. No, they have a purpose, which makes things feel all the more hopeless.

Coming Home in the Dark doesn’t necessarily reinvent the thriller genre. Instead, it takes all its best elements and puts them to good use. The result is a sleek, well-shot, mean, and lean — it clocks in at 93 minutes — entry that leaves you satisfied knowing that you got exactly what you were looking for.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.