Take Shelter

Take Shelter Information

Take Shelter is a 2011 American drama-thriller film written and directed by Jeff Nichols and starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. Plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions, a young husband and father (Shannon) questions whether to shelter his family from a coming storm, or from himself. It was nominated for four Saturn Awards including Best Horror or Thriller Film and Best Actress for Chastain, and won Best Writing for Nichols and Best Actor for Shannon.

Synopsis

In Lagrange, Ohio, Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) has apocalyptic dreams of being harmed by people close to him, but he keeps them from his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and their deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). He focuses on building a storm shelter in his backyard, but the strange behavior strains his relationship with his family. Curtis goes to see a counselor at a free clinic, with whom he talks about his family's psychological history. His mother (Kathy Baker) suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, which presented about the same age that Curtis is now.

Curtis borrows some equipment from his job, including a backhoe, and gets a home improvement loan to start building the shelter in his backyard, all without telling his wife; and she becomes angry when she discovers him working on the project. After Curtis takes more than the prescribed dose of a sedative and suffers a seizure, his wife calls an ambulance. He quickly recovers and explains the entire situation to her. As he works on treatment for his daughter, he begins to miss more work. His boss confronts him about this and finally comes to his house, having been informed about the borrowed equipment. He fires Curtis and levies two weeks unpaid leave on Dewart (Shea Whigham), a co-worker who has been helping Curtis build the shelter.

Curtis buys gas masks for his family and continues work on the shelter, extending his previous health insurance policy for a few weeks. His counselor is replaced and he has to start over with a new one; he storms out of the office. Curtis and his wife fight over his being fired, but she decides to stay, to get him to see an actual psychiatrist, and for both of them to get jobs. He and Dewart run into each other at a community gathering, where they start to fight. Curtis winds up screaming to the room about a storm that is coming and that none of them are prepared. Some time later, a tornado warning sends him with his daughter and wife into the shelter.

After they awaken, Curtis reluctantly removes his gas mask, prompted by Samantha. They go to open the shelter doors, but he says he still hears a storm outside and feels it through the door. His wife implores him that there's no storm and that he needs to open the door for the family. After a tense standoff, he throws open the doors into the blinding sun; a minor storm has passed and his neighbors are cleaning up debris.

A therapist tells them to go through with their planned beach vacation but that Curtis will need to undergo real therapy when he returns. At Myrtle Beach, while Curtis is playing with Hannah, she signs the word "storm." As Samantha exits the house, the thick, yellow rain that Curtis experienced in his dreams begins to fall. She looks up to see a storm brewing over the ocean, waterspouts reach down, and the tide pulls back as a tsunami grows in the distance.

Cast

Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche
Jessica Chastain as Samantha LaForche
Katy Mixon as Nat
Shea Whigham as Dewart
Kathy Baker as Sarah
Ray McKinnon as Kyle
Lisa Gay Hamilton as Kendra
Tova Stewart as Hannah LaForche
Stuart Greer as Army/Navy Dave

Release

Take Shelter premiered in January 2011 at the Sundance Film Festival, and Sony Pictures Classics acquired rights to distribute the film in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. The film also screened in May 2011 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the 50th Critics' Week Grand Prix. It also received the Fipresci award from the International Federation of Film Critics, sharing it with Le Havre and The Minister. In September 2011, Take Shelter was shown at the 37th Deauville American Film Festival, where it beat 13 other contenders to win the festival's grand prize. Later in September, Take Shelter was shown at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and at the 7th Zurich Film Festival, where it was awarded as the best International Feature Film.

The film had a limited release in New York and Los Angeles on , 2011.

Critical reception

Take Shelter has received critical acclaim. Review-tallying website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 138 of the tallied 149 reviews were positive, for a score of 93% and a certification of "fresh," with a consensus "Michael Shannon gives a powerhouse performance and the purposefully subtle filmmaking creates a perfect blend of drama, terror, and dread." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gave the film an average score of 85 based on 33 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 4 out of 4 stars.