The Thousands

This powerfully allegorical film is a study in slow-building anxiety. Ohio construction foreman Curtis (Michael Shannon) has a happy life with wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Then he begins to have terrifying dreams of an apocalyptic storm that turns animals and people into merciless attackers… dreams that persist into uncanny daytime visions. Convinced he must protect his family, and terrified he has inherited paranoid schizophrenia from his mother (Kathy Baker), Curtis begins obsessively renovating his backyard storm shelter…

Perhaps it’s the mysterious score, or writer/director Jeff Nichols’ eye for mood lighting, but Take Shelter reminded me of M Night Shyamalan’s good-hearted protagonists struggling in the grip of crises that could be psychological, social, supernatural or existential. The storm could symbolise the increasingly precarious US economy, or the actual end of the world. Curtis’s storm nightmares are always terrifying because there’s so little aesthetic demarcation between them and Curtis’s ‘real world’.

Shannon beautifully dramatises an agonisingly inarticulate man whose only coping mechanism for mounting internal turmoil is to plan and build, while Chastain’s frustrated Samantha draws strength from her own decision-making. They can’t escape the film’s terrifying, triumphant ending… but they face it together.