Gimme Shelter.
Last night / this morning, I watched Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter (2011), starring Michael Shannon (soon to be the subject of much fanboy scrutiny due to his role as General Zod in the forthcoming Stalin bio-pic Superman movie, Man of Steel; although he's also made an impression in HBO's Boardwalk Empire as a profoundly disturbed Treasury agent, and in William Friedkin's 2006 film adaptation of the play Bug, playing the role that he originated on stage ten years prior) and Jessica Chastain (The Tree of Life; The Help; The Debt; Zero Dark Thirty); it's about a well driller named Curtis LaForche of Elyria, Ohio, who is troubled by a series of weather-related dreams and visions that seem to portend far more than even an F5 tornado. These hallucinations and night terrors understandably lead him to become increasingly detached and make increasingly odd decisions. Lurking in the background is the schizophrenia of his mother, who has been institutionalized for the past twenty years; she became ill in her thirties, when Curtis was ten, and now he himself is 35....
Take Shelter is my kind of horror movie (when I'm not in the mood for a George Romero socio-political commentary-cum-splatterfest, that is): restrained in its use of horror effects, subtle and layered in its depiction of its characters and their interactions with each other. It's also an even better movie portrayal of schizophrenia than Lodge Kerrigan's 1994 labor of love, Clean, Shaven, starring the under-utilized Peter Greene (Pulp Fiction, The Mask, The Usual Suspects, Training Day, the pilot episode of the FX series Justified). No one here is wholly bad or wholly good; and if it's cursed with the adorably cute kid trope of far too many movies, not just horror or thriller movies, at least Nichols is more circumspect about deploying it than, say, Steven Spielberg would've been.
I'm even more interested now to check out Nichols's latest film, Mud (which features Matthew McConaughey actually, y'know, acting; Michael Shannon's in it too, and he was in Nichols's previous feature film, 2007's Shotgun Stories).
Take Shelter is my kind of horror movie (when I'm not in the mood for a George Romero socio-political commentary-cum-splatterfest, that is): restrained in its use of horror effects, subtle and layered in its depiction of its characters and their interactions with each other. It's also an even better movie portrayal of schizophrenia than Lodge Kerrigan's 1994 labor of love, Clean, Shaven, starring the under-utilized Peter Greene (Pulp Fiction, The Mask, The Usual Suspects, Training Day, the pilot episode of the FX series Justified). No one here is wholly bad or wholly good; and if it's cursed with the adorably cute kid trope of far too many movies, not just horror or thriller movies, at least Nichols is more circumspect about deploying it than, say, Steven Spielberg would've been.
I'm even more interested now to check out Nichols's latest film, Mud (which features Matthew McConaughey actually, y'know, acting; Michael Shannon's in it too, and he was in Nichols's previous feature film, 2007's Shotgun Stories).