Midnight Special review: comic-book fantasy cuts to the chase

Midnight Special review: comic-book fantasy cuts to the chase


In a Peanuts strip from the 1970s, young Charlie Brown defined security as the feeling of sleeping in the back of a moving car. "You don't have to worry about anything ... your mom and dad are in the front seat, and they do all the worrying." Set mainly at night and centred on a father and son fleeing from a Texan cult, the latest film by writer-director Jeff Nichols shares this mood of cosiness underwritten by paranoia: the family unit snug in their car, with darkness looming all round.

Jaeden Lieberher in  <i>Midnight Special</i>.

Jaeden Lieberher in Midnight Special. Credit:Warner Bros

At the start of Midnight Special the chase is already up and running, a way for Nichols to create the sense that we, too, have been swept up and carried along for a disorientating​ ride. Quickly, though, we grasp that eight-year-old Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) is far from a normal kid. He hides his glowing eyes behind blue plastic goggles; he can cause explosions or bring satellites down from the sky. He's also a kind of human radio - sometimes "broadcasting" in languages he doesn't speak, an ability the cult members equate with speaking in tongues.


Still in his 30s with four features under his belt, Nichols operates like a musician who is hyper-conscious of his influences, expressing a love of old-school pop in modern indie terms. His last film Mud suggested how Steven Spielberg's E.T. could have looked if the extra-terrestrial visitor had been replaced by Matthew McConaughey's redneck fugitive. In Midnight Special the debt to Spielberg is even more blatant - though there are echoes of other sources, including The X-Files, M. Night Shyamalan and John Carpenter's 1980s classic Starman (not least in David Wingo's electronic score).

Nichols' arthouse background is visible throughout Midnight Special in his refusal to spoonfeed us exposition, his willingness to sacrifice narrative momentum, and his avoidance of the corny moments you'd expect in a more openly generic, abstract story world. Yet he can be abstract in his own way, building the film around clean, geometrical compositions and visual rhymes. The poetry of the title is reinforced by frequent use of midnight blue; the widescreen format underlines the link between the white lines of the road and the horizontal rays that shoot from Alton's eyes when he manifests his powers.

The characters, too, are somewhat abstract, unknowable in varying degrees. In the central role of Alton's devoted father Roy, Michael Shannon dials down his usual manic intensity, but his glower still keeps us at a presumably intentional distance. As for Alton himself, the whole concept of the film depends on our not knowing what might be going on in his head. He remains a placeholder character - a preternaturally solemn, silent little boy, in the mould set by Haley Joel Osment before Lieberher was born.

Much of the colour has to come from the supporting cast, and Nichols' skill with actors is evident in his ability to meld talents as varied as Sam Shepard (as the cult leader) and Adam Driver (as a sympathetic FBI agent) into a cohesive low-key ensemble. As in his previous films, women function mostly as onlookers: Kirsten Dunst as Alton's mother Sarah is subordinate not only to Roy, but even to Lucas (Joel Edgerton), a state trooper who serves as Roy's right-hand man.

In essence, this is a comic-book fantasy about the difference between good and bad dads: nothing about this theme is particularly interesting or new, and it's still an open question how far Nichols can be ranked as an original creator as opposed to a prize pupil. Still, there's no doubting his craft and ambition: Midnight Special is backed by Warner Brothers, and when they promote him to the next level, he'll surely elevate whichever blockbuster franchise he takes on.

Meanwhile, the film's ending sees him grappling with the challenge facing any storyteller who holds out the promise of supernatural revelation: what can possibly fulfil the expectations that have been built up? Shyamalan's famous twists represent one solution to the problem; Nichols tries something different, lifting the veil while leaving some enigmas unresolved. What's clear from the final shot is that he identifies equally with father and son - as any artist might who dreams of one day surpassing his elders.

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