Take Shelter

The family man and construction worker Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) is happily married with Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and they have a beloved deaf daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). Curtis works with his friend Dewart (Shea Whigham) in his team and his mother Sarah (Kathy Baker) has been interned in a clinic since she was thirty years old with paranoid schizophrenia.

Out of the blue, Curtis has nightmares and visions of an apocalyptic storm and he becomes obsessed to build a well equipped storm shelter for his family and him in his backyard. Curtis spends the family savings and gets a loan from the bank to prepare the shelter. His obsession affects his work and his relationship with the locals and Curtis loses his job. Does Curtis have a premonition or is he losing his sanity?

"Take Shelter" is an original drama developed in slow pace with magnificent performances. The screenplay is very well written and despite the running time of 120 minutes, the movie keeps the attention of the viewer until the very last ironic scene. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Abrigo" ("The Shelter")

Note: On 21 August 2024. I saw this film again.

When done right, few tales are more riveting than a person's descent into madness. Alfred Hitchcock proved this time and time again and Jeff Nichols reinforces it in "Take Shelter," a film likely to have been lauded by the master of suspense himself. Anchored by the performances of Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, "Shelter" broods and festers but ultimately thrives on the brink between buildup and utter chaos.

Shannon, far from a household name but a favorite of cinephiles since his head-turning supporting role in "Revolutionary Road," stars as Curtis, a construction worker and father living in a rural town with his wife, Sam (Chastain), and their young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). Their daughter has developed extreme hearing loss and Curtis' job provides them the benefits necessary to afford cochlear implants, but Curtis' recent slew of horrifically real nightmares seems to be the real issue here.

In his dreams, Curtis experiences premonitions of a near-apocalyptic storm that includes odd bird flight formations, motor-oil-like rain, and twisters, and appears to make everyone that shows up in his dreams eerily violent from his dog to complete strangers. The resulting paranoia and occasional physical side affects leads Curtis to seek medical attention, but also to start renovating the storm cellar in his backyard should his visions come true.

The question of whether Curtis is a prophet of sorts or just mentally disturbed drives the film — not much else does. Nichols tells this story largely through a series of character snapshots depicting Curtis riding the ups and downs caused by these nightmares. A few key moments boil the story to a point, namely a riveting scene when Curtis loses it a social luncheon, but the pensive script withholds from us straight through the end like a well-trained indie film.

As we go deeper and deeper with Curtis — and eventually Samantha and Curtis' best friend/co-worker Dewart (Shea Whigham) — we do learn some key details about Curtis' medical history that shed light on the situation, but even in the midst of fact, Nichols never gives us the satisfaction of arriving at any concrete conclusion about his predicament.

With the weight of an immensely introverted character dealing with a mental struggle placed squarely on his shoulders, Shannon proves why you'll only see him with more and more frequency in the future. He makes sure we care about what happens to Curtis, but beyond that he slips back and forth between deserving sympathy and deserving skepticism. He is not simply some Jobian character to whom bad things are happening, and this makes his challenge all the more challenging for the viewer. Credit as well to Nichols for crafting a protagonist far from the norm.

The winner of 2011′s most ubiquitous actress award, Chastain, gets the more alpha-type role instead. She's the good-hearted, open and loving type driven entirely by logic and unafraid of confrontation. Many will identify more with Samantha as a result, which adds a layer of complexity to the film to say the least.

"Take Shelter" offers compelling character-driven suspense, though at times it will try your patience. If you can chalk that up to quintessential indie filmmaking, then by all means do and enjoy this complex and challenging character portrait all the more for it. However, the real thrill of this type of film is that at any moment the bottom might drop out on the entire story (aka the $%&+ might hit the proverbial tornado); the difference between liking that and loving it is accepting when it doesn't.

~Steven C

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How do you handle visions about the future that are so real that you're sure they're going to happen? I suppose that's what it's like to be a prophet, but being a prophet in 2011 is a quick way to get you committed.

Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) was having incredibly vivid visions; so much so he began to build an underground shelter much like Noah began building his arc. Curtis envisioned a biblical storm that would decimate all in its path. The problem is no one else believed him, and there is that small thing about his mom (Kathy Baker) being schizophrenic. Perhaps it was hereditary.

"Take Shelter" moves slow and methodically. It's a bit hard to be patient with the movie as Curtis' life crumbles around him and we're waiting to see if his visions are correct or not. Curtis is such a good guy you don't want him to be going crazy, but you have to prepare for that possibility. To add to his complications he has a deaf daughter (Tova Stewart) in need of an expensive surgery. Curtis paints himself into an untenable position: his vision must come true or he must come to grips with his mental illness.

Take Shelter is an intelligent, thought provoking, nicely shot film featuring an excellent performance by Michael Shannon (an Oscar nomination, surely?), who was also great in director Nichols' previous/first film, Shotgun Stories. The film explores the line between fear and paranoia, or objectivity and subjectivity, as it's protagonist - a blue-collar family man of few words - wrestles with apocalyptic dreams and visions of a strange, possibly supernatural storm, responding to them as best he can as both literal warnings AND possible signs of mental illness. The film has a brooding, at times Hitchcockian atmosphere and a very timely feel to it (think financial and environmental disasters). Set in a rural community, we have plenty of lovely wide shots of the land- and sky-scape (also a strong element of Shotgun Stories) with some added CGI on the latter for the dream/visions. Shannon's performance constitutes at least 50% of this films worth but the rest of the cast are good too. It's a slow mover and, at around two hours and fifteen minutes, perhaps a bit too long. My wife and I did have a few criticisms after watching it (at the Sydney Film Festival), but I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from seeing this film, which will no doubt be a hot topic and bring Nichols deserved recognition when it goes on general release (September 30 2011 in US)

I hear it so much now. Our national discourse is rich with portent. "It's going to get worse before it gets better", "Something horrible is coming, you'll see", "Soon there will be riots". I'm told these things at conventions and while talking to my neighbors and at breakfast with my mother's old friends. Now Jeff Nichols takes an exhausted phrase in storytelling, ("There's a storm coming") and crafts out of it the movie of the moment. A dark, symbolic mapping of the last five years of the middle-class American experience that's bursting at the mental and financial seams. I have yet to see a finer artistic expression of the current existential crises we face. Michael Shannon is the Noah of our hour, plagued with calamitous visions and barely bearing up under the weight of constant anxiety. In fact, the whole endeavor is buried in quiet distress and prescience. And when the movie finally finds the heart to redeem it's long suffering protagonist, it is through the worst of all possible outcomes. Essential viewing for our times.