TAKE SHELTER
Continuing a fruitful collaboration with lead actor Michael Shannon from Shotgun Stories, writer-director Jeff Nichols attempts with his second film, Take Shelter, to viscerally connect his audience with the terror-fraught, deteriorating mental state of a Midwestern construction worker. “You got a good life”, is the enviable but ominous evaluation of Curtis’s best friend and co-worker on an exurban Ohio building site. Though a loving husband to Samantha and attentive father to his deaf six-year-old daughter, Curtis loses sleep over a series of vivid nightmares of apocalyptic storm clouds and driving rain, and in waking life begins to hear echoing thunderclaps on clear days. Shannon carries the movie nearly all the way with his taciturn vulnerability, his panicked, stoic Curtis shielding Sam as much as possible from his sweat-soaked dreams and creeping fears that the schizophrenia that long ago led his mother into an assisted-living facility has now made a genetic claim on his mind. (Bill Weber)
- Michael Shannon - Curtis
- Jessica Chastain - Samantha
- Tova Stewart - Hannah
- Shea Whigham - Dewart
- Katy Mixon - Nat
- Natasha Randall - Cammie
- Ron Kennard - Russell
- Scott Knisley - Lewis
- Robert Longstreet - Jim
- Kathy Baker - Sarah
- Ray McKinnon - Kyle
- Lisa Gay Hamilton - Kendra
- Jeff Nichols
- Adam Stone
- Lyman Hardy
- Parke Gregg
- David Wingo
- Chad Keith
- Karen Malecki
FilmNation Entertainment
