Take Shelter (2011) ****/*****

The main reason Take Shelter exists seems to be as a showcase for Michael Shannon to do his coiled spring act. And if you’ve seen him in things like Revolutionary Road, Boardwalk Empire, or the director of this film Jeff Nichols’ previous effort Shotgun Stories, then you can easily imagine why someone would want to give him that showcase. He has an uncanny ability to play tense, dangerous, and conflicted to the point of boiling over without raising his voice or flailing his limbs. Just through facials, body language, and a burning in his eyes Shannon is able to convince you that there is a storm raging inside of him. There are other actors in this film, and they do fine in smaller roles (especially Jessica Chastain playing his wife, the closest thing to a second lead), but this movie is essentially all Shannon. You’re alone with him for much of the film, feeling what he feels, experiencing the world through his eyes, and I’m happy to report that Shannon more than proves himself as capable of carrying an entire film on his shoulders. Take Shelter is a fascinating watch.

Here Shannon is playing Curtis, a family man living out in the country, and working with heavy machinery for a living. When we first meet him he doesn’t seem to be exceptional in any way. He’s a decent worker, but he’s not the boss. He goes to the bar after work, but he doesn’t have a drinking problem. He skips out on Church, but he doesn’t seem to be a heathen. I might go as far as to call him your average Joe. But there is an indefinable air of menace that surrounds Curtis and his family. He’s always looking to the skies, seeming to sense something on the horizon. He’s got a deaf daughter, and through context clues the film lets us know that something happened to make her that way, rather than her being born that way; but we never find out what. There is vague mention of whether or not he has gone to see his mother recently, but the film doesn’t tell us right away where she is or what her situation is. It’s clear that there are traumatic experiences lurking in Curtis’ past, and there is a dread enveloping his future.

The film really kicks into high gear when Curtis starts having vivid nightmares. They always start with a huge approaching storm, thick motor oil like rain, and then whoever he’s with turns on him and attacks in a violent rage. The dreams are so powerful they send him into convulsions, they disturb him in physical ways that last well into his workday. It’s scary, and once Curtis starts supplementing his night terrors with daytime hallucinations, something clearly isn’t right. It’s not quite clear to us what’s happening to Curtis, if he’s becoming ill, if he has mental problems, or if there is a supernatural element to the film. The truth is out there, but we’re not in the loop, and the film is able to build a very effective mystery around exactly what all of this means.

I’d describe the tone here as anxious, manic, and doomed. Curtis’ dreams are explosions of disturbing violence, and we’re always kept on our toes because we never know if what we’re watching is real or if it’s just existing in his mind, we never know if we’re just in the middle of a scene of mundane family life or if we’re watching a scenario that’s going to turn into one of his horrific visions. You spend a good portion of the film, whether you realize it or not, watching with your body completely tense. And the biggest reason for that is Curtis spends the entire film tense as well, and Shannon does an amazing job of connecting with the audience and making us feel what he feels. Even when he’s not doing anything, it isn’t really nothing. There are always emotions raging inside of him, things he is desperately trying to keep locked away. The chaotic storms approaching in his visions seem to mirror his mental state. And the concrete tomb in his backyard, the old storm shelter that he becomes obsessed with expanding and refurbishing, it seems to mirror the stoic and stable exterior that Curtis works so hard to keep projecting. This is not a man who will easily admit that there are things he can’t handle.

So, what do we have here, just a movie about a man who might be going crazy who spends all of his time building a storm shelter? Not quite, the stakes here are much higher than that. Curtis’ mental state very quickly and very powerfully starts to destroy his personal life. His obsession with building the shelter causes him to lose his job, take a risky second mortgage out on his home, lie to his wife, and put his family’s financial future in jeopardy. When you have a daughter that desperately needs a costly implant so that she can hear again, and when your biggest fear in the world is that you will lose control of yourself and end up losing your family, the stakes don’t get any higher. Eventually all of the rising tension, all of the battles with losing control, they take their toll on Curtis, and he gives in to an explosion of rage. It’s an effective moment.

And then, when a storm does finally come and Curtis and his family find themselves locked down in the storm cellar, a pretty simple situation plays as high drama. Curtis’ wife knows that the storm has passed, we know that the storm has passed, but Curtis is still terrified. He is still certain that the world outside of the shelter door is in chaos, and he refuses to open it. His wife is scared that she has lost him to insanity forever, and she demands that he open the door himself, that he overcome his delusions. Will he give in to rationality and risk his family but keep them together, or will he stick to his gut and keep his family safe but lose them forever? It’s another effective moment.

But, while the film does include plenty of highs that will find you completely engaged, there are some stretches where it can come off as dull as well. More of our time is spent watching Michael Shannon sitting in silence than a lot of people are going to be able to accept. The film moves at a very deliberate pace, and that’s mostly fine because it’s building to a crescendo; I just wish it wouldn’t have built for quite so long. The movie clocks in at two hours when it would have been better served coming in somewhere around an hour and forty-five or even an hour and fifty minutes. Just shaving off ten minutes of bulk would have went a long way toward making it a lot more effective. Maybe get rid of one hallucination scene, after we already got the gist of what was happening, just cut into a couple dialogue scenes, where working class people are sitting around a kitchen table or a heavy duty drill saying nothing of much interest, and it could have kept its momentum up until its very end.

An end that is very key to whether you will walk out of this film accepting it or rejecting it. When I sensed that we were nearing a resolution, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen. Would Curtis find a way to recover from his delusions and maintain a semi-normal life, or would he be doomed to a rapidly degrading level of sanity and sent to an institution, away from the family he clung to so fiercely? Which ending would be most appropriate, what fate was the film building most poetically toward? Honestly, up until the last scene I didn’t know what I wanted. But when all was said and done, once the credits started rolling, I found that I was totally pleased. Take Shelter had taken me exactly where I needed to go, without ever pandering or resorting to a cop out. The last line of the film, one that sent chills up my spine: “Okay.”