MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: MOVIE REVIEW

How far would you go to protect your child? What if saving him meant letting him go? In this piece, Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols brilliantly weaves relatable themes of parental responsibility and faith in the unexplainable into a sci-fi road movie. Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special reverberates with echoes of John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, and Stephen King throughout. So many modern blockbusters err on the side of hand-holding, underlining their plots and character motivations with consistent expository dialogue or overly defined narration. Midnight Special respects your intelligence, letting you understand its themes emotionally instead of normatively. It is an amazing display of visual storytelling, confidently rendered by someone who understands the power of cinema.

PLOT OVERVIEW

Nichols, who is also the writer of the film, plunges us into the action of the piece immediately. Two men, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are in a motel room, watching a news story about a manhunt involving a kidnapped boy. The boy, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) is in between the two beds in the room, reading comic books with a flashlight. Alton is a special boy. In fact, he’s so special that an entire religious sect led by Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard) has sprouted up around him. As Roy and Lucas flee into the night with Alton in the backseat and wearing night vision goggles so they can turn off their headlights to make themselves harder to spot, Calvin’s compound is raided. It turns out everyone is looking for Alton.

Official movie poster

The FBI contacts a specialist to meet with a member of Calvin’s flock named Paul Sevier (Adam Driver), trying to figure what they know about the boy and exactly what this golden child means to them. It turns out that the cult of Alton worships numeric sequences that the potential prophet has been revealing to them. It also turns out that these numeric sequences mean something to the government, and they want to know how a child knew them. Finally, the numbers seem to be pointing Alton, Roy and Lucas to a specific location. Lucas was recently converted through Alton’s ability to convey something transcendent through beams that shoot from his eye, but Roy’s devotion is purely parental. Both men need to get Alton there in time; nothing will stop them.

The drive of Roy, Alton’s father, is made clear in an early scene in which the trio encounters a state trooper. He sees their license plate and looks like he’s about to call it in when Roy and Lucas draw on him – their mission is important enough to kill a cop. Roy’s drive to do what he thinks he needs to be done for his son is motivated by the passion of fatherhood, but is Lucas’ purpose as committed? And how will Alton’s mother, played by Kirsten Dunst, respond? “Midnight Special” is masterful in the way it keeps answering questions and then asking new ones, always staying one step ahead of the viewer. It’s a testament to the trust that Nichols has inspired in his audience over time, the trust that we are in the hands of a master, willing to take the journey wherever it may lead us.