Midnight Special (2016)

A father and son go on the run after the dad learns his child possesses special powers.

Director: Jeff Nichols

Writer   : Jeff Nichols

Stars     : Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst, Joel Edgerton

Storyline

A father and son go on the run after the dad learns his child possesses special powers.

Movie Reviews

With Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols enters the pantheon of those nostalgic American filmmakers armed with their lens flares, Pandora's boxes and deeply sentimental reasons, driven by a protective father figure and a maternal relationship to the plot itself.

Lately, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar walked on the same path, and in many ways Midnight Special strangely looks like Interstellar. There's always the same contrast between gigantic and local stakes/issues that can already be found in Spielberg's filmography : on one side, humanity's fate is at stake, supervised by an omnipotent government, and on the other side it is (and perhaps only) a "family affair".

David Wingo's soundtrack is electrifying, the script is intelligent enough for not telling us the whole plot and characters' background in a few lines of dialogue, and despite a half-hearted performance by Michael Shannon, who still shines in its restraint, and some facilities in scriptwriting approaching the end of the film, Midnight Special is so perfectly controlled that it would be difficult to get out of the theater unscathed.