If you haven't yet, see Take Shelter. Skip Mud.

Take Shelter (2011) is a disturbing, suspenseful thriller that hovers between genres: sometimes horror, sometimes a portrait of mental illness, sometimes gut-wrenching family drama, all of it a film you should rent as soon as possible.  Take Shelter is the story of Curtis (Michael Shannon), a construction worker in rural Ohio who is the sole breadwinner for his wife (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter (Tova Stewart). He has a steady job, good friends, a loving wife, a cute kid, and, apparently, excellent health insurance that will repair her hearing.  Ostensibly he has everything he needs to be happy, but is haunted by visions of an apocalyptic storm, one where rain “like motor oil” falls, birds collapse dead from the sky, and faceless villains appear in the windows of his house and car to steal his daughter away. To prepare for the coming storm, Curtis sets out to build a fortified storm shelter in their backyard.  The obsession costs him his savings, his job, the trust of his wife, and the insurance that he needed for his daughter’s surgery.  And the storm comes anyway. 

Sucks to suck, Jessica.

One of my most reliable tests for if a movie is worth recommending to other people is whether or not I’m thinking about it the next morning.  Take Shelter stuck with me through the next morning and several mornings following in a visceral, primitive sort of way.  This isn’t a story of a man gradually succumbing to his family history of schizophrenia, though that is hinted to be the explanation for his nightmares.  Rather, Curtis’s terror is one that pushes beyond the bounds of mental illness.  This is a man surrounded by a home and by people he loves desperately and would die to protect, but he is haunted by the constant awareness that one day, inevitably, these people and things will be taken from him.  The “storm” can be read as death, or foreclosure, or sickness, or a stock market crash, or anything else, but the constant, gut-level dread that Curtis faces is one that many viewers will find relatable. 

If you’re going to pick a Jeff Nichols movie to watch this weekend, make sure it’s Take Shelter and not Mud (2013), no matter how much buzz it got and no matter what its tomatoameter rating was.  Nichols’s second and third films were remarkably similar in their setting— rural, character-driven dramas— and in their downright moodiness, but Mud makes a lot of missteps Shelter managed to avoid.  For starters, in terms of casting, Nichols stacked the deck of Shelter in all the right ways.  Shannon, in particular, progresses stunningly from a visceral, body acting of anxiety in his shifting eyes and facial features and builds slowly to his full-on meltdown in the climax of the film, and the static performance from Chastain, who is resolutely loyal but puzzled and heartbroken by his husband’s unraveling, is perfect opposite him.  By contrast in Mud, Matthew McConaughey’s performance is solid, but the script gives him little to work with, and places him opposite Reese Witherspoon who contributes nothing to this film but a tattoo and accent. 

 Take Shelter is one of the standout films I’ve seen over the last two years, and this weekend I’m planning to sit down and watch Shotgun Stories, Nichols’s first film.  If it’s anywhere close to Take Shelter, and I’ve heard good things, I’ll be even more convinced that this is a director to watch.

For more Beth and Louise Hate Movies, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast.