Take Shelter (Hydraulx, REI Capital, Grove Hill Productions, Strange Matter Films, Sony Pictures Classics, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I didn’t get around to screening a movie until nearly 10, but it was one I particularly wanted to watch on Hallowe’en because it’s a horror piece, in a way, but without graphic violence. It was called Take Shelter and had been recommended by my good friend David Agranoff of the Dickheads podcast as a particularly good modern science-fiction thriller – though I’m surprised David liked it so much since his tastes usually run more towards blood and gore. Take Shelter is a story set in semi-rural Ohio and is centered around a suburban family, the LaForches: husband Curtis (Michael Shannon, a tall, lanky actor of the type Lifetime usually casts as their “good” husbands; he’s not especially sexy but he has a nice basket and writer-director Jeff Nichols gives us a lot of medium shots that feature it), wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their eight-year-old daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Hannah is deaf and this has forced the adult LaForches to learn sign language. Curtis has a job that involves running a drill through the earth, though precisely what he and his company do is a bit ambiguous – we see a lot of him and his best friend and co-worker Dewart (Shea Whigham) not only working together but hanging out, working on their cars, drinking beer and doing other movie indicia of proletarianism. The story revolves around Curtis’s growing conviction that a huge storm of Biblical proportions is coming their way – though Nichols, whose marvelously elliptical script reminded me a lot of 1940’s RKO horror producer Val Lewton and what he wanted (and got) from his writers and directors, doesn’t really nail that down until shortly before the film’s climax – and his determination to keep himself and his family safe by expanding his house’s storm shelter.

He takes out a second mortgage to raise the money to buy a giant cargo container to bury in his backyard as the body of his shelter. He gets himself fired for taking his employer’s construction equipment to dig the hole in which he’s putting the container. Curtis locks the family dog, “Red,” in an outdoor pen and later gives the dog away to his brother Kyle (Ray McKinnon). He’s also haunted by the fact that he’s in his early 30’s – the same age his mother was when she developed paranoid schizophrenia and had to be institutionalized – and there’s a marvelously written scene in which he goes to visit her in her “assisted living facility” and it seems like a deceptively normal mother-son reunion, but with the threat of madness lurking on both sides. Losing his job, his income and his health insurance bothers him and really freaks out his wife – especially since it comes just as they’ve finally been able to schedule Hannah for a cochlear implant operation so she’ll be able to hear. (Nichols doesn’t tell us whether she’s been deaf from birth or she once could hear and lost her hearing through accident or disease.) Take Shelter is a riveting mood piece despite – or maybe because of – its maddening slowness; Nichols is one director who insists on taking his time and making the audience wait for the Big Revelations instead of throwing everything up on the screen immediately. He also keeps us in suspense for the entire movie as to whether Curtis is perceiving a real threat everyone is missing, or he’s going down his mom’s path of paranoid schizophrenia. Nichols throws us clues in both directions, including vividly dramatizing Curtis’s dreams (including one in which his dog attacks him) and in one scene having Curtis wet the bed after a particularly traumatic dream. He also seeks counseling, but the nearest psychiatrist is all the way out in Columbus and the only therapy option closer to home is a clinic with a Black woman who seems nice and nurturing enough but explains to him that she’s not an M.D. and therefore she can’t prescribe medications. Nonetheless, they seem to have a rapport – until one days when he shows up for his session and she’s been replaced by a middle-aged white guy with whom he feels no rapport at all and who’s clearly interested only in going through the motions of therapy until they can get someone else.

At the end Curtis locks himself, his wife and their daughter into the shelter and they ride out a day-long storm. Samantha and Hannah are anxious to get out of there but Curtis is reluctant, not knowing just what fate awaits him when he finally opens the shelter door – and Nichols has carefully set it up so we don’t have a clue, either. It could be anything from a perfectly normal day to the entire community being obliterated by a gas cloud (one of the dangers that’s been talked about earlier in the film) to any number of dire consequences. (We and Curtis have already seen a preliminary storm in which great numbers of black birds swirled around each other in the sky and then suddenly started falling to earth, dead.) Eventually Curtis opens the door and the first thing he sees is a glowing sun, but when he and his family come out life has returned to normal. His doctor talks him into taking the family on their usual vacation in Myrtle Beach, and Curtis appears to have been cured and avoided both real and hallucinated storms – only [spoiler alert!] as they’re hanging out in the beach resort a huge storm looms over the horizon, and the film suddenly and unspectacularly ends.

Take Shelter is the sort of movie you really think they didn’t make anymore – it was only Nichols’ second film as writer-director (he has an upcoming credit as a writer on the sequel A Quiet Place III) and he has a totally sure hand with his material and his approach to it. Take Shelter is quite remarkable and enjoyable if you can take Nichols’ elliptical style – it’s not until Curtis disrupts a Lions’ Club supper with tales of an upcoming flood of Biblical proportions and chews out his neighbors (people he’s literally known all his life) because they haven’t been prepared for it that Nichols makes it clear just what he is so afraid of. It’s the sort of movie I really like but at the same time I wouldn’t want all movies to be like it. It was a good film to watch on Hallowe’en night because it was legitimately scary without going through the usual tropes of horror films, classic or modern. Charles said the film it reminded him of was The Mosquito Coast, a 1986 movie based on a novel by Paul Theroux about a man (Harrison Ford in the original film, Justin Theroux – Paul Theroux’ nephew – in the currently running TV mini-series remake) who suddenly relocates himself and his family to an isolated village in Latin America. The story it reminded me of is Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, in which a chemical cloud decimates a community in upstate New York and then passes, leaving everyone it affected (the survivors, anyway) pretty much the way they were before. White Noise was the first book I read after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and though the catastrophe in it was an environmental disaster rather than a deliberate assault, the overall mood of the novel seemed to fit the circumstances of the time in which I was reading it. I’ve long wished that someone would film White Noise, and judging from his work here Jeff Nichols would be the perfect person to write and direct that movie.