Take Shelter is bleak and beautifully shot, charting a man’s helpless decent into schizophrenia and the tensions this brings to his family life. Curtis Laforche (Michael Shannon) lives with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastin), and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart). Their lives are pressured by money worries and Hannah’s disability, but their family begins as a happy one. However, Curtis begins to see images of apocalyptic storms, and decides to take action by building a storm shelter in the yard.
The film is driven by fine performances from both Shannon, as the nervy Curtis, and Chastain, who movingly portrays mixed feelings of anxiety and supportive commitment. The two work brilliantly together portraying their domestic apocalypse in the face of mental illness.
However, these powerhouse performances do not hide the fact that the storyline is drawn-out. Take Shelter works well in depicting Curtis’s gradual, piece-by-piece disintegration into paranoia, but there is too much unnecessary detail that slows the pace of the film.
Take Shelter poignantly addresses current cultural anxieties about financial collapse, and is certainly worth seeing for its main performances, but its slow pace and miserable content mean it won’t be a film for everybody.