Midnight Special

Midnight Special (2016) opens on a news report about an abduction. Two men are driving at night with a boy; the car windows are taped over with cardboard and the child is wearing swimming goggles. Federal agents are after them and so is a sect that has built its worship around him. The reason is what the boy can do. Its best decision is refusing to explain. Nichols never sets out the rules; the characters already know them and the audience works it out in pieces. Jeff Nichols wrote and directed. It was his first studio production, after independent films like Take Shelter and Mud. The emotional core is about fatherhood and comes from his own life; he has described nights spent beside a sick child shaping the film. Michael Shannon plays the father, Joel Edgerton his friend, Kirsten Dunst the mother and Adam Driver an NSA analyst. Sam Shepard plays the leader of the sect. It was shot over forty days in New Orleans between January and March 2014, on a budget of 18 million dollars. Critics compared it to Spielberg and Carpenter, influences Nichols acknowledges openly. It opened on 18 March 2016 and took only 7.7 million dollars worldwide. It runs 112 minutes. Good for: science fiction that withholds, stories about fathers and sons, and Michael Shannon. Less good for: the secret is revealed visually at the end, and that sequence feels disconnected from the register of everything before it. The sect's story starts and is abandoned. The characters' motivations are underbuilt.