Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/27/11
As you probably know by now,
I like to start these reviews with some sort of sweeping generalization
about a movie genre, current trend or life in general. But I find
my usual boilerplate fails me when it comes to Jeff Nichols’ new psychological
apocalyptic horror flick Take Shelter. Not because it doesn’t
tap into the zeitgeist of our troubled times, brilliantly confront you
with the horrors of mental illness, depict one of the best movie marriages
of all time, demonstrate how effective restraint can really be in raising
scary stakes or show how familiar genre elements can be elevated by great
acting. The thing is, Take Shelter does so many things so
well I just don’t have a solid entry point. Nichols controls his
tone of rural dread with skill unseen since the salad days of M. Night
Shayamalan and stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain put on an absolute
clinic in the leading roles. No need to ease into it: Take
Shelter is one of the very best movies of the year.
Curtis (Michael Shannon)
is a construction foreman happily married to housewife Samantha (Jessica
Chastain). His insurance is about to finally allow their deaf daughter
Hannah (Tova Stewart) to receive a cochlear implant, and, as his best friend
Dewart (Shea Whigham) observes, he’s just got a good life. Then come
the dreams. Intense visions of a coming storm that will pelt the
countryside with something that’s not water… and once they’re wet, the
people around him will start stalking, grabbing, attacking… These
dreams result in real physical pain and Curtis starts trying to take steps
to guard against what he’s seen. When his indoor dog chews through
his arm in a dream, it goes into a fenced-off doghouse outside, and he
takes out a risky loan and gets Dewart to help him appropriate company
equipment to work on a massive storm shelter in the back yard. But
even Curtis knows there’s another possible explanation for the “visions”:
when he was young, his mother (Kathy Baker) was hauled away to an institution
after developing schizophrenia. He sees a counselor but can’t make
the trip to the far-off psychiatrist his doctor recommends. And the
visions grow steadily worse: when Dewart comes at him with a hatchet
in a dream, he has him assigned to another crew. When the truth about
the shelter comes out, Samantha must decide whether she’ll stand by her
husband, who is either going mad or foreseeing the approach of something
unspeakable.
“Something’s coming… something
that’s not right,” Curtis explains at one point, and Nichols has concocted
the most disturbingly vague apocalypse I can recall seeing on screen.
No blood is shed, but those affected (infected?) by the oily rain in his
visions are clearly violent, aggressive and somehow inhuman (had I not
been freaked out to the breaking point by the trailer for The Crazies
last year, I could probably draw some parallels). Nichols keeps most
of the nastiest stuff from the visions off-screen, leaving it to Shannon’s
descriptions and our imagination to depict the full scale of what could
be coming, but what he does give us is creepy as hell. He also wisely
keeps us from really looking the affected in the eye, adding to their inhuman
creepiness, with the exception of a single almost unbearably suspenseful
scene where Curtis simply stands across a silent room from someone close
to him who’s soaking wet and no longer who they once were. And the
performances in that scene… wow!
Which is Take Shelter’s
secret weapon: Shannon is required to communicate the dual track
horrors of possibly losing his mind or knowing that something is coming
that will make him wish he had through a character who simply does not
speak about his emotions, and he is nothing short of sensational.
He and Nichols work hand in glove making the plot run as it not only keeps
the answer to crazy/prophetic a secret until the very last scene, but makes
them both convincing alternatives, and that would never sell if Shannon
failed to sell either half of the role as well as he does. Curtis
knows he must be losing his mind, but he also knows that the end is near.
Chastain matches him as one of the movies’ most intriguing wives:
Samantha has no visions and has no reason to stand by Curtis as he drives
the family deeper into financial and personal ruin. But she does,
hesitantly, because she’s his wife and she loves him. The way Curtis
and Samantha face an uncertain future, be it one of schizophrenia or apocalypse,
together without delusions makes them one of the most fascinating movie
couples ever. And when they exchange a grand total of three words
before the credits roll and let you know everything about the journey they’ve
taken... goosebumps!
Nichols has scored one of
the year’s great writer/director achievements. His screenplay is
a marvel of parallel construction and doomsaying imagination and his direction
harkens back to the very best early work of the aforementioned Shayamalan
(think hard and you’ll remember what a compliment that actually is).
And incidentally, his brother Ben is a pretty fine musician: the
song “Shelter” that plays over the end credits should really take home
the Original Song Oscar. I can’t remember the last time a song made
such an impact on a movie in context.
The best compliment I can
give a horror movie: Take Shelter shook me up and had me checking
the rooms in my house before I walked into them for a couple days afterwards.
And it’s as brilliant as it is spooky, anchored by two of the year’s best
performances. It’s a pity Sony Pictures Classics has stamped this
disturbing slice of American Gothic as an “art house” movie and denied
it nationwide release, but if you get to a chance, you really need to see
it. Even if you don’t go for the greatness, it’s one seriously creepy
flick. |
