Jeff Nichols' Quaint and Forgotten Sci-Fi Gem Turned 10 This Year

There’s an invisible chemistry that happens when the first sounds and images of a film strike your brain. It’s not dopamine; nor adrenaline. It’s hope tinged with uncertainty. A feeling that’s just beginning to tingle your sensory receptors, with a long way to go to become fulfilment if there are no sideroads to derail it. Jeff Nichols’ low-budget road thriller, Midnight Special, has such a beginning.

In it, the muffled voice of a news anchor on TV tells us that an 8-year-old boy was kidnapped, while we see a middle-aged man removing duct tape from a peephole and cardboard boxes from the windows in a cheap hotel. The other man in the room is packing guns into a duffel bag. A child sits on the floor between the beds, reading comics with a flashlight under a blanket. When he unveils himself — wearing goggles and earmuffs — we know he’s the kid from the news. Film schools should teach this as the epitome of an opening scene.

The brooding and cryptic vibe set in that sequence is so potent that it commands the rest of the film. Nichols has a keen talent for creating atmosphere blazed with a singular mood that is predominant in virtually all of his movies (especially Take Shelter and Mud). He constructs milieus first and only lets characters merge with them second. Words have special weight in his films because they’re prefaced with charged silences that speak the loudest.

Midnight Special — his only major studio film — is no exception. It might be his most approachable work for casual viewers, but it’s still thick with ambience throbbing with a dark and poignant aura that often feels like it was shipped from the 1980s. Despite taking place in present times, it has the energy of a crumpled beige retro jacket worn by rugged fathers from tougher times. Its vulnerable masculinity is emitted by Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton, who may be two of the last practitioners of that acting style where old-school machismo and tenderness can intersect without friction.

For a sci-fi, technology is largely absent in Midnight Special as if to eliminate the slightest chance of interfering with its vintage mood. Deliberately, it’s more Eastwood’s A Perfect World than Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although it shares some DNA with both. Even when we witness the flashes of otherworldly powers Jaeden Martell’s boy possesses — shooting ominous blue beams from his eyes and speaking in unknown tongues — Nichols frames them as dark magic; too mystical and gothic for the common man to understand. It gives the film a peculiar quality that feels like watching falling stars next to a bonfire replete with an eerie mystery.

A mystery that’s as fascinating as dangerous, as hopeful as it’s inevitably sad, and which makes honest and honourable men in their forties break the law and evade authorities for a purpose none of them truly knows but only feel is right. Yet when the end of the journey eventually catches up to them, their souls are finally at peace with what they did.

Midnight Special turned 10 earlier this year without anyone paying proper tribute to what a special little gem it is. So I felt like I had to.

The Screen

‘Saving Private Ryan’s Potent Camaraderie Remains Timeless Even at 25

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July 24, 2023

Perhaps the best word to describe Steven Spielberg’s classic war epic, Saving Private Ryan — which celebrates its 25th anniversary today — is “shocking.” Even two and a half decades after its premiere, the early scene of landing Omaha Beach is a stomach-churning 25 minutes of vicious and overwhelming chaos. Spielberg purposely throws us in the midst of a raw and violent battle with little exposition. The first combat scene