Trey Edward Shults
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It Comes at Night DP Drew Daniels on New Lenses, Old Dogs and Using Actors as Bounce Cards
As the end credits rolled after my screening of Trey Edward Shults’s It Comes at Night, a perturbed woman behind me angrily groused, “This is bullshit. WHAT comes at night?” In her defense, the mesmerizing trailer for the film from A24 certainly leads you to believe something is in fact coming at night — a concrete something, not a metaphoric something. But no horrific, plague-mutated creatures ever arrive at the red door that separates the apocalyptic outside world from the isolated home of Paul (Joel Edgerton) and his family (wife Carmen Ejogo and son Kelvin Harrison Jr.). What does come […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 29, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night
When I interviewed Trey Edward Shults for our 25 New Faces list in 2015, he spoke of his new project: For his next film, Shults is again drawing on a family story — his father’s death. “It’s not a straight drama about a guy passing from cancer,” Shults says. “I’m trying to take those feelings and emotions and put them into something bigger. And, yeah, it’s like my version of a horror movie. People ask, ‘Wasn’t Krisha that?’ But it’ll be even more intense than Krisha.” I don’t know how much those intentions of Shults’s have shapeshifted since our interview, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2017 -
Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
by David Lowery on Jan 20, 2016 -
“The Odds Were in Our Favor to Fail”: Krisha at the BFI London Film Festival
Krisha Fairchild is a 64-year-old actress who lives in Mexico and has four dogs. She’s named after a young Polish girl who saved her father’s life during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. With an older sister named Vikki and a younger one called Robyn, Fairchild grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, the three sisters take turns visiting their 91-year-old mother — who suffers from cognitive brain damage as a result of her late onset closet alcoholism — in an assisted living facility in Texas. Fairchild’s mother is remorseful about the addiction, and like her own alcoholic father, is charming […]
by Taylor Hess on Nov 20, 2015 -
Chronicle of a Dream Foretold: BAMcinemaFest 2015
“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy,” comments one of the tenuously overlapping characters in Richard Linklater’s 1991 game-changer Slacker. The word itself, fairly recent at the time of production, is a moniker the speaker fully embraces. The branding may sound tactless, if not downright pejorative, but it’s not at all: It implies enough empathy and humanity to seek out options to offset destructive disinterest in matters tangible, ethical, or both. In the creative sphere, the shift in course can lead to an untried M.O. and the models it might generate — if the stars are properly aligned, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jun 16, 2015
