Cinema can become a tool for the exorcising of demons. Repressions and life experiences can suddenly be evoked and shared with everyone in the theater or watching at home. Joachim Trie’s dark and perceptive film Thelma is a gothic parable which serves as an interesting examination of the consequences of repression. A young girl becomes the receptor of her parents’ rigid, one could say Puritan, religious views of the world. Released in only a few arthouse venues and now available for streaming via Amazon, Thelma touches upon issues rarely gazed upon by mainstream/fantasy cinema. In an increasingly secular- albeit not rational- world, organized religion is being relegated more to a habit of the past. It even seems the Pope now claims hell does not exist. But for those raised within islands of dogma, belief is a very powerful and palpable part of life. [Read more…]
“You’ve got a good life, Curtis,” says Dewart, Curtis’s best friend and co-worker. (Dewart is played by Shea Whigham, Curtis by the amazing Michael Shannon.) “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man: take a look at his life and say, ‘That’s good.’ ”
A sinister corollary to Dewart’s homespun truism might be that the greatest fear a man can experience is that of losing the good life he has. It is this anxiety, which afflicts Curtis in especially virulent form, that defines the mood of Take Shelter (2011), Jeff Nichols’s remarkable new film. It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.