MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (2016) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jeff Nichols
Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst,
Jaeden Lieberher, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard
There's a dimly lit room with a television tuned to a newscast, a story about an eight-year-old boy who's apparently been abducted. Three people are moving around in the room: two rough-looking men and a boy wearing goggles - the boy in the newscast. The three people leave and get into a car. It's night. The boy with the goggles sits quietly in the back seat, using a flashlight to read a Superman comic book. You can tell there's something unusual about this kid, and the deference the two men show toward him (and his apparent comfort with them) suggests that this is no ordinary abduction. The story that unfolds involves a cult, a cryptic sequence of numbers, and soon the FBI and the National Security Agency. Where is this going, and how weird will it get? You have no idea. It's like what you might get if David Cronenberg were to direct "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The interiors are shot in limited light. (There's a reason for that.) The actors, including Kirsten Dunst, who plays the boy's mother, are devoid of movie-star glamor. The dialogue is spare, and nothing in the movie seems wasted. As the story plays out and grows increasingly outlandish, you think, how can they make a movie this strange and crazy, that gets stranger and crazier as it goes, and keep it all together and pull it off? I'm not sure I have an answer for that. But they pulled it off.
Sam Shepard
(1943-2017)
