Casey Affleck Company opens as a fireside yarn that unspools into a chain of eerie vignettes, each feeding the next with the ritual cadence of a campfire storyteller. The film is steeped in superstition, violence and American Gothic curiosities, from an isolated hermit’s shack to the suggestion of something awful hidden just out of sight. Affleck’s third feature leans into theatrical flourish and a deliberately old-fashioned delivery that invites the audience to settle in for one tale after another.
There is plenty to appreciate in Casey Affleck Company, even as some flourishes feel too carefully cultivated. The premise begins on a stormy winter night with a stranger who sits to share a story. From there the timeline drifts, moving from December 1975 to 1953, then 1903, and eventually across the Atlantic to Europe in the shadow of the plague.
Nick Nolte appears as a recluse grieving a missing daughter. Ben Mendelsohn plays a dour farmer too quick to reach for his gun. The air is heavy with the sense that both men are heading for grisly fates.
Casey Affleck Company finds its core in a frontier tale
The question of where the nested narration is heading, from a woman telling a tale of a woman, resolves into the woods and darker country. The centerpiece arrives in the Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, where Adelaide Clemens and Scoot McNairy portray Rebecca and Emmett, a hardscrabble couple who discover a teenage boy, Caleb, collapsed in the snow.
Caleb is played by Atticus Affleck, the director’s youngest son, who starts off with feral awkwardness and grows increasingly assured on screen. He claims to be older than he looks, with travels to Argentina and London behind him. When Rebecca begins to fear he may be tied to a string of local killings, his bleak aphorisms only deepen the unease. “This whole world is tall grass,” he says. “You have no idea of the dangers underfoot.”
Affleck co-wrote the script with Ron Hansen, the novelist behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, adapted into Andrew Dominik’s 2007 film in which Affleck portrayed Robert Ford. As with that earlier portrayal of a grasping outsider, there is a chilling ambiguity to Caleb, who settles into the farm and seems in no rush to depart.
He may be a drifter spinning fantasies for work. He may be something far more malignant blown in from the wilderness.
Affleck’s career since Jesse James has swung between peaks and quiet stretches. He won the best actor Oscar for Manchester by the Sea and appeared as an army intelligence figure in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Off screen he has faced allegations of sexual harassment that were settled out of court, and the film occasionally reflects a strain of grievance through characters claiming injury and disbelief. The hermit’s wife, we are told, died due to a negligent physician, while Emmett watched his father shot by a powerful landowner. Authority is feckless and the innocent suffer. These digressions verge on special pleading and contribute little to the spine of the narrative.
The film is strongest when it returns to the fire and to the genre’s reliable fixtures. Affleck’s affection for American Gothic is evident, and playing it straight helps the mood take hold. The result is an engaging diversion, not entirely cohesive but rich with atmosphere and a persistent metallic bite.
The movie’s caution is clear. Avoid the woods after dark. And if a stranger knocks at dusk, consider carefully before inviting them in.
Festival
The film screened in competition at the Venice film festival. For more on contemporary cinema, read our review of ‘Filipiñana’.