USA - 123 minutes
Written and directed by Jeff Nichols, Take Shelter is the journey of Curtis (Michael Shannon), a miner in a small town of Ohio and his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain). Their young daughter anxiously awaits a cochlear implant that relies solely on the medical insurance provided for by Curtis' employer.
As Curtis struggles to learn sign-language necessary to converse with his daughter, the pressures of managing a gas drilling site that is behind schedule due to torrential rain, his sleep is interrupted by graphic nightmares. Soon Curtis slips between the lucid nature of his dreams and reality.
His waking hours embody the sensations of his nightmares that leave him literally gasping and disturbed. His wife and community question his sanity and so does Curtis. Unable to shake the overwhelming sense of doom, Curtis resorts to sleeping pills, psychiatry, and a library of mental illness books. Nothing seems to help.
Convinced his dreams are premonitions, Curtis becomes obsessed that a tornado is approaching at any moment. Curtis borrows against his mortgage to build a storm shelter for his family, urging everyone else to do the same. Somewhere in the back of his mind though are reminders of his mothers paranoid illness that has her institutionilised around the same age as him.
Dramatically poetic, brilliantly filmed and edited, this film is filled with metaphor that contradict the literal actions of Curtis. A engaging film that questions jobs versus environment.
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