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This story seems chock full of opportunities to explore the psychic nature of our country's currant state of anxiety. Daily, the news seems like one nightmare scenario after another; it's safe to say we have all, at one time or another over the last ten years, felt, experienced the tinge of nightmare in our own kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards.  The film makers appear to be exploring something along those lines. We get this most clearly in the way we perceive the house this family lives in. It's a realistic, ordinary environment, full of objects that we all recognize and take for granted. As the film progresses, there are moments when these ordinary objects become ominous signs and signals warning us that something awful is coming. We may even at times think of Shannon's husband character as a modern day Noah, torn between what his gut is telling him to do and what ordinarily would seem to him and everyone else insane. We might have stayed connected with the character and the story's meaning if that had remained the case, but when the issue of the mother's mental illness becomes an important circumstance, all that gets softened, the nightmare really might just be a bad dream. Though the possibility of a rational explanation may in theory give this Noah story an aura of psychological  realism, for me, it paradoxically undercut anything that connected the characters, the relationships, the the consequences that followed with the very real world the film otherwise depicts. After the film's first, fake ending, the other one is no surprise, at all. Instead of feeling the rush of inevitability, we feel cheated.     

The fact that I'm always on the lookout for movies that push our well fed expectations past the boundaries of Hollywood storytelling makes me even more disgruntled over TAKING SHELTER than I would ordinarily be. The opportunities are all there, vivid and clear, and Micheal Shannon has shown us before that he's game and fully capable of creating a character that personifies our deepest, most pessimistic fears. After seeing the film, I walked to my car wondering what is was in the movie that won such critical praise? It's a question that I'm still mulling over.