A crisis happens over time, continuously building. We know when it is happening and that it is building, but frequently, and this being the saddest part of crisis, is so many of us have no idea what it truly is or what to do about it. We let it consume us, perpetually battling against it alone, turning our minds into an arena for a one-on-one duel. Duels that can, and do for many, lead to death.
Take Shelter, the latest film by Jeff Nichols starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, is about crisis. It’s a simple premise with lofty goals and implications. Curtis LaForche (Shannon), the head of a family that includes his wife Samantha (Chastain) and daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), live a normal life in Ohio until the onset of a crisis. Curtis begins to have nightmares and hallucinations that would suggest a cataclysmic storm is brewing that will destroy him, his family and possibly the world. Curtis has a familial past involving schizophrenia, his mother being afflicted with it while he was a young boy, and he knows this could be the possible cause of these nightmares and hallucinations. However, the lucidness and following horror of these hallucinations and nightmares create an existential dread for Curtis that consumes him and becomes his reality regardless of if they’re real or a symptom of a brain deteriorating. Curtis becomes obsessed with building a storm shelter to protect him and his family from the storm that he believes is coming, all the time unaware that it’s actually already arrived and brewing inside him.
Curtis’s struggle is not just the visions and the nightmares or the supposed impending storm, but his adamant belief in his reality and the inability to share and articulate it to others, specifically the ones closest to him. In one scene Curtis stands watching a breathtaking nights sky filled with sporadic lightning and remarks “Is anyone else seeing this?” a variation of a thought we all perpetually think to ourselves consciously or unconsciously. Am I fundamentally alone? Is anyone else really seeing or feeling what I’m seeing and feeling? The solipsism that we all indulge in an allow to transform our minds into prisons for us to suffer alone in. The film shows us a man who traps himself in his own reality and allows it to drive him to the brink of madness until he lets the ones closest to him in. He does so in a powerful scene with his wife Samantha where he hands her a key (intentional or not, the symbolism is strong). It’s a scene of such intensity and beauty that Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain should be applauded for it (Shannon specifically deserves an Oscar, I doubt I’ll see a better performance in the next few years).
Take Shelter is about letting people in, about not letting ourselves get consumed by our mind and letting it be the master of us. We don’t have to face crisis alone, because even though others can’t ever truly know how we feel or see things, they can understand that there are different ways to see and feel, and that allows them to be our support, our lifeline. The last scene of Take Shelter is a moment of triumph, a testament to what it means to be human and be connected to other humans. Something that we will need to learn if we’re going to face the very real external and the internal crisis's we're in.
