Thursday, April 26, 2012

The Intriguing Film "Take Shelter"


Take Shelter is a 2011 American drama-thriller film starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. The film is written and directed by Jeff Nichols. 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. a small town in 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 suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which set on at about the same age that Curtis is now.
He buys gas masks for his family and continues work on the shelter, extending his previous health insurance policy for a few weeks. His former counselor gets replaced by a new one with whom he has to start over; he storms out of the office. Curtis and his wife fight over him getting 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 that none of them are prepared for. 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 the doors open 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, dark rain that Curtis experienced in his dreams begins to fall. In the reflection of the doors, a storm brewing over the ocean is shown. Simultaneously, the tide pulls back, creating a tsunami in the distance. This card was sent to me by Sabine from Germany.