This article contains spoilers
“Take Shelter” (2011) stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain. Shannon is a blue collar worker at a construction company, which provides a modest income to support his wife and daughter who is deaf. Pretty much the plot is that Shannon is seeing things that (gasp) might not even be there—apocalyptic scenes like people attacking his family or motor oil falling from the sky instead of rain. He begins to miss work and becomes obsessed with building an underground tornado shelter to protect his family from the impending “storm”. But no one else, including his wife played by Chastain, believes him and everyone thinks he is kuh-razy, confirmed even more when he has nightmares and visits a psychologist.
The tension in the movie comes, not only from the imminent threat of the world ending which trickles in from Shannon’s dreams and waking visions but mainly from the social connections surrounding Shannon. “Take Shelter” has a lower budget, typical of many “indie” films and it works to its advantage. Whereas most movies that deal with the Apocalypse are able to gain large backing from film studios due to the easy sell from an audience consumption standpoint, as it is a universal idea (it doesn’t take much understanding to watch a city get mauled by aliens or earthquakes)—because this movie has to dial back on special effects (which, when they happen, look quite a bit better than most big budget effects) it has to be smart, it has to synthesize, for instance, an erratic pattern of (CGI) birds into the story so that it is jolting while the audience still buys it. Thus while no cities are atomized the stakes still feel as high (or even higher) because it is a personal apocalypse that Shannon faces, the loss of his social standing in his small town community, his job (ability to pay for his daughter’s extra needs), and even his familial relationships (Chastain is like: why are you building a storm shelter with the money we could be spending on something else?).
To Shannon, the natural world around him is falling apart, becoming corrupted just like his mind in struggling to cope with whatever he thinks is coming for him. He is fired from his job and loses his social standing by being a doomsayer to those who won’t believe his prophecies. This all climaxes at a Lions Club social where his friend fights with him and Shannon starts flipping tables (no more chicken dinners for him the audience supposes) and he leaves, urging his family into the storm shelter to wait out a tornado warning. In a lesser movie this scene where the Chastain and their daughter, now highly suspicious of Shannon’s mental state, watch him, disturbed at his unwillingness to let them leave the shelter, could have devolved into some kind of Shining-esque situation where Chastain has to kill Shannon to escape—instead it strengthens the characters resolve to stay together even when there was no physical apocalypse outside. This is the point in disaster movies where the main characters get up from the rubble and get excited because they survived, this is the real survival of Shannon’s personal apocalypse, that the family unit was preserved after his “storm.” The actual ending isn’t important because when it arrives, Shannon has already found peace with his own reality.
