Skip to main content

Midnight Special


Evening in a motel room somewhere in Texas. Two men are preparing to leave, taking down the bits of cardboard which they have taped, for some reason, all over the windows. The TV shows a news report about an abducted boy. The boy sits in a corner of the room under a bedsheet, wearing blue swimming goggles and ear defenders. We will work out later that one of the men, (Michael Shannon) is his father, and is escaping with him from a cult. The men take the boy outside to where their car is waiting, and drive off, but the desk clerk has recognised them. Listening to police radio channels, they realise the cops are onto them. They pull off the freeway onto country roads. Night has fallen. The driver puts on night vision goggles, switches off all the car's lights, and accelerates into the dark.

So begins Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special, a film which I missed completely on its release, and only stumbled across recently on Amazon Prime. I had no idea what it was about, but right from that opening sequence you can tell that it's something, well, special.

In fact, it's probably best to come at it knowing as little as possible, since it makes some very effective gear-changes, starting out like a thriller, turning into spooky-child sci-fi, and then into something else again. In plot terms it's pure hokum: a little bit Close Encounters, a little bit E.T (though are no extra terrestrials in it, exactly), but it's quieter and stranger than a Spielberg film. It starts in media res and ends without explanation. The pace is relentless, but the mood is melancholy, all flat landscapes and muted colours. The cast is great - Michael Shannon, Joel Egerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Sam Shephard. Jaeden Leibeher is excellent as the boy. Bill Camp does wonderful things with a small role as the reluctant amateur heavy sent out by the cult to retrieve the missing boy. "What do I know about something like this?" he wonders dolefully, nerving himself up to go and threaten a witness. "Sometimes we are asked to do things which are beyond us." There is a superbly clumsy and un-glamorous fight/shoot-out. It all feels very real - stumbling conversations, grotty motel rooms and gas stations - which gives the fantasy elements more power than they would have in a glossier setting.

I hadn't seen any of Jeff Nichols's films before, but I'm going to seek out all of them now.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after a painti

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A  is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p