Take Shelter

Hoping to evade the ruinous demands of heredity, a hardworking father alienates his family while trying to protect them from dangers they can’t understand. Jessica Chastain stars as the man’s supportive, haunted wife.

Quick: Does that TV Guide-ready thumbnail describe The Tree of Life or Take Shelter?

Chastain, of course, is in both (just two of the hundred or so movies that have put her name on marquees this year), but in Take Shelter, as a wife and mother named Samantha, she is more present and alert than she is in Terrence Malick’s loosely woven Zen helix. The earlier movie calls on her to play maternity as sainthood, a task made impossible by Malick’s impressionistic storytelling and further undermined by Brad Pitt’s overpowering performance. Asked to render an almost literal earth mother, she’s fascinating as a spiritual woman flattened out by mortal fears and masculine domination.

In writer-director Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter, Chastain again worries over a family that’s more fragile than anyone suspects. This time, the material gives her latitude to build something closer to a whole character, though again the husband dominates. There’s an excellent reason for that and for Samantha’s grave concern: This stern paterfamilias is sinking irretrievably into madness.

That would be Curtis, the blue-collar father played by Michael Shannon with terrifying intensity and low volume. Eventually he will seethe and shake. He will howl to his friends and family, “There’s a storm coming!” By that time, he has earned the release, and so have we. What makes Take Shelter a clammy, hand-wringing stress test of a movie is the ordinariness of its triggers. Yeah, there’s a storm coming — it’s raining unemployment and debt out there. When a health-insurance bureaucrat of uncommon empathy tells Samantha how lucky she is that Curtis’ coverage is comprehensive, you know you’ve heard the equivalent of the Amityville house issuing its “get out of here” warning.

“I just don’t want to see you fuck up,” Curtis’ obliging lunk of a friend Dewart (Shea Whigham) tells him. By this moment, we’ve seen that Curtis is well past merely fucking up. Having survived a childhood broken by a paranoid-schizophrenic mother (Kathy Baker, desperate not to remember), he is marking age 35 — the same age his mother was when she abandoned her children — with a series of Cormac McCarthy night terrors. When these intensify, he checks out a library book and identifies in himself several indicators of approaching mental illness. It’s no spoiler to say that his grip on this reassuring self-awareness fails.

To answer his apocalyptic visions and increasingly hallucinatory waking life, Curtis takes out a loan so he can add onto the old tornado shelter in his Ohio backyard. (The banker who advises against this risk is another horror-movie trope adapted to scare the shit out of anyone who has tried to balance a checkbook since 2008.) Spurred by a deadly chlorine spill in a neighboring community, he stocks the plumbed-out space with gas masks and SpaghettiOs. The result: a fortress against toxic events real and mental, with no refuge from self-inflicted damage.

What Curtis doesn’t do is tell Samantha his plans. Or their cost. Or that cyclones and zombies infest his psyche, despite handfuls of sedatives. So until Take Shelter‘s final scene, it’s not only a thrilling descent into insanity but also the most brutally frightening Dr. Phil ever. One about deception and surprise in marriage. One about the outer limits of wifely patience.

We endure Curtis’ nightmares with him and follow him down sterile free-clinic hallways as he seeks help, so there’s no doubting his perspective. And even as fragile as he finally admits he might be, Curtis is driven by a certain throwback masculinity, one that Brad Pitt’s Tree of Life character would recognize. Take Shelter suggests in its final seconds that there’s reason to stand by your man, even if he has lost his balance.

For most of its running time, Nichols’ movie is a mocking corrective to The Tree of Life, a retort demonstrating the ways that bruising chaos trumps fleeting nirvana. Wherever the rich roots of family (if not humanity) lie buried, Curtis is ready with a backhoe. But in the end, when there’s a storm coming, listen to your husband. Scary stuff indeed.