Brain Storm

Curtis Laforche (Michael Shannon) is standing outside his rural Ohio home when the first meteorological omen comes: “Dark, thick rain,” he says later, “like fresh motor oil.” Steel fingers of lightning angrily streak the sky; swarms of birds fly in chaotic formation, as if an A-bomb just exploded. Then the signs get more personal. The family dog, good old Red, takes a vicious chomp out of Curtis’ arm. While driving, he and his 6-year-old daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) are attacked by a murderous mob. Sitting at the kitchen table, he can’t help noticing his loving wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) eyeing a butcher knife.

Any sensible person, Curtis thinks, would see these as dire portents–hints that God is finally fed up with humanity–but only he notices them. In fact, they’re awful dreams or daydreams; every time he nods off, it’s the night of the living dead. His behavior frightens Samantha and annoys his co-workers at a construction business. Curtis is racked too. He worries that his mother’s mental illness may have infected him. But on the chance that these nightmares are visions, he starts building a storm shelter in the backyard, all the while wavering between his faith in his private revelation and his suspicion that he’s going mad. The viewer wonders too: Is he Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Jack Nicholson in The Shining?

Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter arrives in theaters Sept. 30 with its own imposing fanfare. A hit at the Sundance and Toronto festivals, it won the Critics Week prize at Cannes. Now mass audiences can see what all the hubbub was about. This movie, by a young master of the foreboding detail, is an eerie drama that blends impulses of the art film (family tensions seeking resolution) with those of the mainstream (a lone man facing a great calamity).

The rare indie picture with tremulous suspense music and ultracool special effects (by Hydraulx), Take Shelter at times plays like the first horror movie made for the Weather Channel. But it locates its dread in the all-too-realistic travails of a family coping with the Great Recession, where the scariest monsters are mortgage payments and bills for a child’s operation, yet Dad just decided that it’s worth going into hock to build a subterranean rec room. Indeed, Curtis’ “psychic or psychological” dilemma–is he farsighted or is he seeing things?–could be a metaphor for that of Tea Party members, in that he thinks 1) the end days are coming and 2) I know how to survive them, even though 3) the numbers in my economic plan could lead us all into bankruptcy.

Chastain, a translucent redhead who has made seven movies on offer this year (memorize their titles like the names of Snow White’s dwarfs: The Tree of Life, The Help, The Debt, this one, Texas Killing Fields, Coriolanus and Wilde Salome), is as grounded here as she was ethereal in The Tree of Life. She wants to bring Curtis down to earth or out of the shelter. The film’s sweetest scene is from Samantha’s viewpoint: she and Curtis standing in a calm Ohio night filled not with ominous lightning but with cheerful lightning bugs.

Still, Take Shelter belongs to Shannon, who looks like David Letterman’s super-serious son and earned an Oscar nomination in 2009 as the wayward truth teller in Revolutionary Road. He crawls into the goose-bumped skin of an ordinary guy seized by a terrifying belief and convinces viewers that, if it could happen to Curtis, it could happen to us. Take Shelter’s lingering threat should have filmgoers checking the night sky as they leave the theater. That rumbling–is it a storm or a sign?