“Midnight Special,” from writer-director Jeff Nichols, evinces the same knack for melding realism and fantasy that the filmmaker brought to his breakout 2011 film “Take Shelter.” In that film, Michael Shannon delivered a haunted, enigmatic performance as a man desperately trying to save his family in the face of unidentified natural forces.
Here, Nichols once again explores the thin line between the strange and the familiar, the fantastical and the grounded, in another domestic drama threaded through with intimations of the cosmic.
“Midnight Special” unfolds with such a tense, carefully calibrated sense of revelation that even the slightest hint of synopsis turns into a spoiler. After one of the finest, most intriguingly puzzling opening sequences in recent memory, the film becomes a low-key game of cat-and-mouse, as Shannon’s character — with the help of a friend played by Joel Edgerton — ferries an 8-year-old boy through moon-lit Texas back roads in order to escape from a semi-religious cult.
Interestingly, the boy is played by Jaeden Lieberher, who can now be seen in the wonderful film “The Confirmation,” where he assumes a similarly watchful, somber role opposite Clive Owen. Lieberher turns out to be perfectly cast in the drama of a gifted child, expressing naivete and wisdom in equal, winsome measure.
As his character comes into focus — along with those played by Shannon, Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst and Adam Driver — “Midnight Special” shifts from a thriller reminiscent of “Blood Simple” to a speculative adventure that revives the work of Spielberg, Lucas and Kubrick at their most elemental and astonishing.
Not every single thread is neatly sewn up in “Midnight Special,” and there’s a least one scene, when someone makes a fatal decision at a gas station, that beggars belief, given the characters’ behavior up to that point. But Nichols establishes such a grounded sense of atmosphere and such superb control of mood and pacing that the odd hiccup barely matters. Now an established master of allowing a foreboding sense of menace to seep into life at its most drab and daily, Nichols isn’t interested in style and eye-popping visual effects for their own sake — although he’s clearly having fun when they do come into play.
Even at its most imaginatively out-there, “Midnight Special” is most profoundly about the enduring parental narrative of letting go. Like his fellow Austin-based filmmaker, Richard Linklater, Nichols is proving to be a director blessed not only with impressive chops, but quietly confident humanism.
