A man on the edge in 'Take Shelter'

If Michael Shannon doesn't win an Oscar for "Take Shelter," there's no justice in the world, so he'll probably go off empty-handed. But a nomination seems a sure thing. Few actors could sustain the intensity displayed by this startling young performer, who stole "Revolutionary Road" from his co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in 2008 by virtue of one scene, and got a nomination. (TV viewers know Shannon as the intense Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden on HBO's "Boardwalk Empire.")

Few films, for that matter, are so intensely focused on a single character, or one whose crisis is so disturbingly rendered. Is Curtis LaForche -- husband, father, gainfully employed oil driller -- manifesting the same schizophrenia that institutionalized his mother (Kathy Baker)? Or is he being given a glimpse into the apocalyptic future?

Curtis is almost certainly sick, his dreams cast with vicious dogs and menacing intruders, his ears filled with a thunder no one else hears, his sensory overload in contrast to the deafness of his hearing-impaired daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), and the matter-of-factness of his bewildered wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain, who's having some year).

As his obsessions start to undo his once-tidy life, he's aware of the destructiveness he's causing but is helpless to stop it; as a portrayal of mental illness from the inside out, "Take Shelter" seems unprecedented, and horrifyingly real.

"Take Shelter" echoes with questions of near-biblical gravity. What, for instance, is prophesy? Amid the movie's neo-Faulknerian landscape and devout churchgoing Southerners, the question intrudes: Who are those people reading their Bibles? Madmen? Schizophrenics? Or people who were, and perhaps are -- in the person of Curtis -- provided a glimpse of divine truth? It's the kind of stuff that puts your hair on end. But one needn't be a believer to get a tingle out of "Take Shelter," or to revel in the virtuosity of Shannon, the heart and soul of director Jeff Nichols' harrowing, finely controlled and unforgettable movie.

PLOT A husband and father in the rural South begins to have strange dreams and visions that portend disaster. RATING R (language)

CAST Michael Shannon, Jessica Chastain, Tova Stewart

LENGTH 2:00

PLAYING AT Malverne Cinema 4, Manhasset Cinemas, East Hampton 6, Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington

BOTTOM LINE Absorbing, disturbing and brilliantly acted journey into a man's mental breakdown.

Back story: Marriage is the heart of the tale

Director Jeff Nichols began "Take Shelter" as a meditation on free-floating, generalized anxiety, it became a far more personal endeavor. When he started the film, he had just gotten married.

"Being in my first year of marriage . . . I was just figuring out, 'Well, what does marriage mean and what does it mean to be committed and how do you make a marriage work? Why do some work and most not work?' Those were just personal questions I was trying to answer on my own, and they kind of found their way into this story. For me, they became the heart of the story, [because] if Curtis ever makes a mistake in this movie, it's not opening up from the beginning and sharing his fears with his wife."

Although Shannon related to Curtis' plight both as a partner and a father (he recently had a baby with his longtime girlfriend), he noted that Nichols' writing gave the character even more layers.

"It's mentioned very quickly, but Curtis says that his father passed away recently," Shannon explained. "So there's also that element, that] your role model or example is no longer there and you really are in the driver's seat as far as being the patriarch of the family. That was something I could identify with, because my father had passed away not too long before I started working on the film."

-- The Washington Post