Midnight Special

 Two men (Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton) try to smuggle a child (Jaeden Martell) across state lines while hunted down by every law enforcement agency in the land. It seems everyone is after the kid: besides the ongoing manhunt for him and his kidnappers, a shady cult views him as their saviour, the FBI and NSA seem to think he's somehow in possession of state secrets... and it quickly becomes apparent that they all might be onto something. The kid in question is a little more than human: he can shoot light and information out of his eyes and is able to pluck satellites clean out of the night sky.

 The boy needs to move eastwards and be at a specific place at a specific time for... something to happen. Helping him are his "kidnappers" - one of whom (Shannon) is his biological father. 

 Writer/director Jeff Nichols slowly, patiently reveals how everything hangs together over the next two hours while maintaining a deep sense of mystery; not everything will be explained, but it's enough. Midnight Special is a conscious attempt to recapture the allure of 80's science fiction movies the director loved as a kid - think early Spielberg, but Nichols keeps the focus close to his characters and carefully grounds even the most fantastic elements deeply in the mundane. It's an idiosyncratic, grounded take on its inspirations.

 And damn if it doesn't work beautifully; The mystery is engaging, the pacing both sedate and relentless, and all that hard work establishing a sense of normalcy heightens the modest action and makes it feel actually dangerous. It's a ripping, low-key yarn interwoven with a meditation on parenthood that hit me like a hammer the first time I saw this at the theater; it's lost very little of its power since.

 I unabashedly love this movie, but it's a hard one to recommend - whenever I've done so, it's with some heavy caveats that it skews more drama than sci-fi. It promises a little more than it can deliver, and as a result the third act revelations are... well, a little bit underwhelming. The script can get a little clunky every now and then. All minor complaints to me, compared to its strengths, but I can see how someone would bounce off it.

 Those strengths, though! Nichols directs the ever-living fuck out of this, as usual, and gets to indulge in (tiny amounts of) pyrotechnics, car crashes, even a little gunplay. It's less than you'd see on a given episode of any action TV show, but it goes a long way when shot in Nichols's naturalistic style and when it involves characters we actually care about.

 Regular collaborators Adam Stone and David Wingo are present and accounted for. Wingo in particular provides a soundtrack that's about as memorable as any from the last decade, especially the beautiful piano-driven title track. Stone's photography, meanwhile, makes the world lived-in and worn down while still delivering some outstanding shots (it's got to be hard to portray a convoy of buses as beautiful, but somehow he manages.)

 Ultimately, as on most of Nichols's movies, it's all about the actors and their characters. And here he's assembled an insanely talented cast who proceed to hit it out of the park: Shannon, Edgerton and Martell are later joined by Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, and Sam Shepard, as well as Bill Camp as an electrician who's called on to act as a cult enforcer, and proceeds to comply with poignant melancholy. "Sometimes we are asked to do things that are beyond us..." It happens, buddy. I hope you survive.