‘Midnight’ sci-fi look at parenting – Slow-burn supernatural thrill

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Kirsten Dunst arrives on the red carpet for the screening of Midnight Special, at the 2016 Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin. (AP)
Kirsten Dunst arrives on the red carpet for the screening of Midnight Special, at the 2016 Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin. (AP)

BERLIN, Feb 13, (RTRS): The director Jeff Nichols has a knack for turning his personal life into cinema, and he’s done it again in “Midnight Special,” a sci-fi-tinged movie about a boy with extraordinary powers inspired by his own son.

Starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver and Kirsten Dunst, the film was shown on Friday at the Berlin Film Festival, in competition for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear.

The protagonist is about an eight-year-old boy named Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who has the power to detect encrypted government data transmissions — among other things. He also has eyes that can emit laser-type beams, which makes the government think he may be a secret weapon.

His father Roy (Shannon) and mother Sarah (Dunst) have to take extraordinary steps to keep Alton from being captured by the FBI, or by a religious cult.

Nichols was widely praised for his 2012 feature film “Mud,” about two boys who befriend a drifter who lives on an otherwise deserted Mississippi River island. He has said that film was inspired by his experiences as an adolescent boating on the Mississippi.

His new film had its genesis in an illness suffered by his young son, and the realisation of how important parenting was.

“If anything ever happened to him out in the world I would be devastated, and I had no control over that, and this fear kind of overtook me because I realised how delicate this situation was and this relationship was,” Nichols told a news conference.

“And I think ‘Midnight Special’ began as a way for me to process that fear. I think the reason why we love our children so much is because of this fear and I made a film about it.”

The importance of relationships in childhood became a theme of the press conference, with Dunst being asked how she had managed the often awkward and sometimes fatal transition from child actress to adult screen star.

“It’s hard to be a child actress and make sure it’s balanced with school and friends and all of that stuff and I always had that so I got lucky with growing up in that way,” she said.

“But there is a point I think with any job that you do if you do it that long that you question whether you want to continue doing that and I definitely had that and I kind of, I think when I was around 27, I kind of shifted the way I worked and it made me love it even more.

Passionate

“So in a way I have kind of waited more for projects the older I get and, you know, been a little pickier because I have to be extremely passionate about something in order to do a role.”

Opening with a child abduction and ending with a spectacular sci-fi finale on par with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the Bible Belt-spanning “Midnight Special” demonstrates once and for all that indie auteur Jeff Nichols is now the go-to storyteller for the kind of slow-burn supernatural thrill audiences once sought from M. Night Shyamalan — that is, before the “Sixth Sense” director went off the deep end with “Lady in the Water.” Serving up hefty human insight in place of third-act gimmickry, and reuniting him with “Take Shelter” star Michael Shannon, Nichols’ impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.

Backfire

The less audiences know going in, the better, though that could backfire on a movie without a big enough star to attract the crowds it would need to inspire a word-of-mouth following. With only a TV orange alert by way of exposition, “Midnight Special” relies on the ability of an intelligent audience to make sense of what is happening, understanding that even writer-director Nichols probably doesn’t have an explanation for everything. The film opens in a seedy hotel room, where kidnapper Roy Tomlin (Shannon, intense as ever) and his gruff crew-cut accomplice, Lucas (Joel Edgerton, sporting a convincing Texas accent), are holed up with the 8-year-old boy they’re accused of kidnapping. Their young charge is played by Jaeden Lieberher, who held his own against Bill Murray in “St. Vincent,” but takes a sullen backseat for much of this trip.

The TV reporters are suspiciously vague when it comes to information on the missing child, named Alton Meyer, and while their broadcasts serve to amplify the hysteria of his absence, we have reason to be skeptical. As it turns out, Roy is Alton’s birth father, and this is more of a rescue than a kidnapping. Little by little, we learn that Roy and his ex-wife, Sarah (Dunst), once lived with a religious cult on “the Ranch,” surrendering their son for adoption to the group’s self-righteous leader, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard at his most severe).

Though intimidating enough at first glance, Calvin is swiftly and ingloriously deposed before his parishioners — a bunch of glassy-eyed hicks in hand-sewn prairie garb — during a FBI raid that suggests the federal agents may have learned their lesson from 1993’s tragic 51-day standoff with the Branch Davidians just outside Waco, Texas (not far from where the film begins). Nichols treats these gun-toting yahoos with a fair measure of respect, suggesting they had reason to believe in something. After all, Calvin pulled his apocalyptic sermons from whatever Alton mumbled during his violent seizures — or else from looking directly into the boy’s eyes, which emit a blinding white light. Even religious cynics would have a hard time arguing with that nifty trick, which leaves witnesses the phenomenon feeling a powerful sense of purpose.

Alton is clearly no ordinary child, though everyone has a different understanding of what he might be. Calvin and his followers see him as some sort of prophet, as well as the key to their redemption. Roy and Lucas also recognize him to be special and, more importantly, in need of their protection, risking their lives to drive the boy cross-country for reasons only Alton understands. And greenhorn NSA officer Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) seems to view him as a serious threat to national security, capable of decoding heavily encrypted transmissions and pulling satellites out of orbit.

With the exception of the latter detail, which makes for one of the film’s most stunning sequences (a meteor shower over a remote Louisiana gas station), the beauty of Nichols’ screenplay is that it relies almost entirely on our imaginations — that, plus anticipation of whatever big reveal might be waiting at the end of the road. He keeps us mostly in the dark, literally, reveling in the deep, velvety blacks of d.p. Adam Stone’s widescreen 35mm cinematography. Considering Alton’s extreme photosensitivity — so much so that he might die or explode if exposed to light — Roy and Lucas drive exclusively by night, using a succession of different vehicles, beginning with a classic 1972 Chevelle whose rumbling motor makes your insides vibrate, while composer David Wingo amplifies our sense of squirmy unease with his agitated score.

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