Review: Take Shelter (15) ***

Take Shelter features a hero who begins to question his very sanity when vivid nightmares of an approaching apocalypse start eating into his waking hours.

Michael Shannon, the soon-to-be-a-very-big-star actor from Revolutionary Road, World Trade Center and Vanilla Sky, is Curtis, an average husband and father who suffers ever-more frightening premonitions.

As the visions become more regular and forbidding, so Curtis begins unconsciously preparing for something. But what? He doesn’t know and asks a mental health counsellor for advice. Meanwhile, wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) can only watch in horror as her man slides ever further into the abyss.

Take Shelter is a psychological thriller that presents a portrait of what appears to be slow mental disintegration. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Shannon is propelled onwards, throwing money and energy into building a super storm shelter in his garden and filling it with provisions.

Shannon has a face that hints at anything other than an ordinary man. His gradual metamorphosis from Joe Shmoe to terrifying harbinger of doom is plausibly done and builds to a volcanic public meltdown in which, like a Bible-thumping preacher of old, he warns darkly of the consequences of ignoring his portents of destruction.

It is the film’s key scene and, in a slow-moving plot laced with meteorological trepidation, is well worth the wait. Scattered before it are the phenomena that are driving Curtis to distraction: unusual bird behaviour, odd cloud formations, lightning, viscous yellow rain and those terrifying dreams.

The film’s red herring is daughter Hannah, a deaf child who eventually becomes a conduit for Curtis’s fears. But for much of the tale he is trapped within his world just as she is contained within a world of silence. Written and directed by Jeff (Shotgun Stories, also starring Shannon) Nicholls, Take Shelter is an intelligent extension of the traditional paranoid thriller that takes in elements of old-time Hollywood disaster flicks. It augurs well for more from the amazing Michael Shannon, who ricochets from normal to maddened in the blink of an eye.

Stick with this one; it rewards the patient.