Take Shelter (***)

I have trouble suspending my disbelief when it comes to the supernatural, but I went to see this because I’d read good things about the film and Michael Shannon’s performance. From the plot summaries, I couldn’t get a handle on whether the film is really about the supernatural, which is because the film keeps it ambiguous for a long time. Construction worker Curtis, Shannon’s character, is definitely having some unusual experiences, mostly in his dreams, but some, like the brown rain in the opening scene, apparently in real life.

The other thing that makes me nervous about a film like this, where one odd thing happens after another, is that nearly the whole film winds up being a big question to which the answer has the potential to really lower my evaluation of the movie as a whole. Other movies like this are Close Encounters of the Third Kind—Curtis seems crazy the way Richard Dreyfuss’s character there does—or Frailty, which involved a character who was either a religious nut or a prophet. This is like that a little too, but without the religious angle. Also, Curtis isn’t such a hardass, so his wife (Jessica Chastain) notices quickly when he begins behaving strangely. He himself is caught between wondering if he’s crazy (it runs in the family) or prescient, or both. They have a deaf little girl; her silence in situations where another child would cry out help create tension.

Ultimately, although writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) throws an interesting false ending in, I did feel like the answer to the the movie’s question—is he just nuts?—was a letdown. Another answer might have been also. But there’s enough tension built up, and enough just plain drama, to make the success not completely dependent on the ending. Shannon has the showier role, but Chastain (whose breakthrough roles in The Help and The Tree of Life form the other two thirds of a sort of housewife trilogy for her) has the unappreciated role of reacting to a husband coming apart at the seams. This has only a few special effects, but if you do like a supernatural story, and like it told subtly, you’ll probably like this more than I did.

IMDB link

viewed 11/9/11 7:00 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/9/11