Fans of writer-director Jeff Nichols might detect echoes of his hair-raising 2011 film Take Shelter in his latest effort, not least the presence of regular Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon as one of the leads, but this time his scope has broadened hugely. Cosmically even, since Midnight Special hints at hidden universes and galaxies far, far away, even though it's firmly rooted in the everyday detail of the rural American South.
In creating a kind of supernatural fable, Nichols has studiously avoided in-your-face effects or pedantic exposition, instead keeping his narrative lean and throwing the ball back to the viewer to interpret as they see fit. Outwardly it's constructed as a mix of road movie and pursuit thriller, into which we're parachuted to find Shannon's Roy and his partner Lucas (Joel Edgerton) fleeing from a motel at the dead of night with a young boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher, pictured below with Edgerton, Shannon and Kirsten Dunst). He seems to be a very special child, with headphones clamped over his ears and his eyes hidden behind heavy dark glasses, as though to quarantine him from the outside world. It's not clear whether he's escaping or being kidnapped.
We sense that these are desperate times, prompting desperate measures. A collision with another vehicle, bizarrely stopped in the middle of the road, brings an encounter with a highway patrolman, and Lucas, also a cop, doesn't hesitate to shoot him in his desperation to get away. As the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that Alton is a precious cargo, and the two men are racing to meet a deadline of huge but unspecified significance.
Nichols feeds us some back story in the form of pieces of jigsaw we can try to assemble as best we can while the fugitives hurtle across Texas and Louisiana in their battered but powerful Chevrolet. Alton, we learn, has been whisked away by his father – Roy – from the clutches of a mysterious cult at a place called the Ranch in Texas, run by the icily clinical Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard). The cultists have seen Alton's strange powers (these include talking in unknown languages, emitting a blinding light through his eyes and even causing a military satellite to explode), and have come to see him as the talismanic being who will save them from the Doomsday event which, they feel sure, is due on March 6.
Meanwhile the Feds and the government suspect Alton is some kind of deadly weapon, and have staged a raid on the Ranch for which Nichols has said he found inspiration from the real-life 2008 police bust of a polygamist sect in Eldorado, Texas. Nichols portrays officialdom as bullying, myopic drones, with the exception of Sevier, a boffinly analyst empathetically played by Adam Driver (pictured below) who has some intuitive understanding of the boy's "specialness".
You can read as much into all this as you like. As the story triangulates itself towards a climactic encounter in which the extent of Alton's true unearthliness is revealed perhaps a little too literally, echoes of Spielberg's Close Encounters or JJ Abrams's Super 8 start to jingle distantly. The evolving theme of Roy bringing Alton back to reunite with his mother Sarah (a soulful Kirsten Dunst) lends powerful emotional weight, in which quasi-biblical overtones can be discerned in the way the parents must accept that their little boy could never truly be theirs, since his destiny lies way beyond.
Ultimately Nichols' ambitions run a little beyond his grasp, and Midnight Special isn't sure whether to be an apocalyptic premonition or a touching family drama supercharged with X-Files-ish trimmings. Whatever it is, absorbing work from Shannon, Dunst, Driver and Edgerton ensures that it will hold your attention right up to the closing credits.
