Watch Movies Online :

• Director: Jeff Nichols
• Release Date: Sep 2011
• Run Time: 120
• Genre: Mystery & Suspense, Drama

Take Shelter is one of those extremity movies; you either hate it or love it. Well, I loved it. It clearly beings out the theme of Lunacy vs. Prophecy and leaves the audience pondering over the possibility of prophetic dreams revealing the future.

Take Shelter revolves around the family of Curtis LaForche (played brilliantly by Michael Shannon). Curtis is a humble construction worker in Ohio; he is just your run-of-the-mill guy with a wife, Stephanie, and a deaf daughter, Hannah. Nothing in his life is out of the ordinary….that is, until he starts having terrifying and realistic dreams about an oncoming storm disaster that makes Hurricane Katrina look like a soft wind. He at first tries to dismiss this as nothing but a bad nightmare that will go away but as time passes, these visions get more real and more intense. He even begins to hallucinate in broad daylight. It is at this stage that Curtis starts believing the dreams as a warning of disaster that is yet to come. He is torn between sharing these disturbing nightmares with Stephanie and keeping them a secret, but he knows Stephanie would doubt him and think him insane so he keeps the dreams and the knowledge of impending doom to himself.

This is a difficult secret to keep to oneself and his sudden behavior change takes a toll on his family. His wife can tell there is something wrong but is unable to reach out to Curtis. Blinded by the fear of the on-coming storm, Curtis puts his construction skills to good use and starts to construct a full-proof tornado shelter to protect his family from the storm he believes is oncoming. Throughout its construction, we see Curtis facing an internal struggle, trying to decide if he has gone mental or if he has really seen the future.

The movie is a one-man show, with its focus almost completely on Michael, who does an excellent job in getting the audience plugged into the storyline and gets them to care for him as a character. You almost can’t wait for the end so as to see if Curtis was a man losing his mind or a man with a vision that saved his family. Michael is no doubt a brilliant actor and his acting talents make this movie that would otherwise have been painfully slow quite an enjoyable fete.

In the fast-paced twenty first century where majority of movies that Hollywood churns out are all action-packed and melodramatic, this movie seems slow by such standards. The plot reminds me of old-fashioned story telling where the characters were fully developed before the action scenes filled our screens. Some may argue that the story takes too long to unfold but if you enjoy a good, well-told story, this is definitely a movie for you. It will be no surprise if Michael Shannon wins an Oscar for his brilliant performance in Take Shelter.