Take Shelter (2011)

There is a moment in Take Shelter when the main character's wife finally snaps, screaming at him “Are you out of your mind!?”. It's a question the audience has been asking ever since they sat down. Curtis (Michael Shannon) is an an average, salt of the earth American, with an an average, blue collar job, an average home in an average white picket fence American town, and an average loving wife and an average young daughter. In fact the only decidedly unaverage thing about Curtis are his dreams of an impending storm of apocalyptic proportions. Night after night he is plagued by the belief that something catastrophic is coming, and that he must prepare to protect his family. He begins to obsessively stock pile food and renovate the storm shelter behind his house, using all his family's savings, while his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) becomes ever more concerned that he is succumbing to the paranoid schizophrenia that saw his mother institutionalised when he was just a boy.

At the heart of Take Shelter is the constant question of Curtis' sanity, and it's one to which director Jeff Nichols seems unwilling to give a straight answer. Despite everything we are told about his family's history of mental illness, and his own acceptance that he may be going insane, the entire film is saturated with an overwhelming sense of foreboding. Even in it's most quiet moments there is the sense that something cataclysmic is never far around the corner. In Curtis' obsessive paranoia there are echoes of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, not least when his cosy family life begins to come apart at the seams. There are also the tiniest glimmers of a post 9/11 political subtext, with Curtis' growing paranoia over the nameless, faceless something coming to small town America, but this is so subtle it's barely there and the film works perfectly well without it.

Jessica Chastain gives a brilliantly restrained performance as his concerned wife, and in any other movie she would be the clear highlight; but this is Shannon's show. His performance veers wildly from understated intensity to out and out mania and it's a testament to his ability as an actor that he manages to bridge the gap so seamlessly. Curtis is a perfect example of the kind of roles that Shannon is now know for: a man circling the very edges of insanity, occasionally dipping his feet in before recoiling in horror, never demonstrated better than the scene in which he wildly berates his work colleagues for their lack of concern over his warnings, to the horror of his wife and confusion of his daughter. It's a heartbreaking moment, as any pretence of normality within his life comes crashing down, and he must endure the half scared, half pitying looks of his friends. The film's great triumph is in the emphasis placed on the fragility of his life over the portentous possibility of the storm, and it's an amazingly understated film, considering it deals with a potential apocalypse. I was so surprised by just how good it was that I spent ages racking my brain for the flaws I was sure I must have missed. If there is a problem, it lies in the running time, and at 121 minutes there is the tiniest sag in the middle of the film. This is a miniscule problem however, and it took me a long while of thinking to even come up with it. Five minutes probably could have been left out of the middle, but even as it is the film is an enigmatic, heartbreaking and compelling affair that I have no qualms about declaring a low key masterpiece.