Gather ye ’round the glowing screen for a Casey Affleck campfire tale. It contains superstitions and murder and human oddities of all stripes. An old hermit in his shack. Something nasty in the woodshed. If you like the first tale, fill your boots, settle back, because here comes another and another; each sparked by the embers of its neighbour and playing out with the same deliberately theatrical panache. Affleck’s picture roams and rambles like a creepy cracker-barrel Jackanory.
Actually there is much to relish in Company, Affleck’s third film as a director, even if many of its elements feel like off-the-peg eccentricities; a little too laundered and self-consciously strange. It begins in tried and tested fashion with the arrival of a mysterious stranger on a dark winter’s night. The stranger takes a seat and spins a tale, at which point December 1975 melts into 1953, then 1903, before finally the film crosses the ocean to Europe at the tail end of the plague. Nick Nolte is a hermit pining for his lost daughter, while Ben Mendelsohn plays a mean, mordant farmer who reaches for his handgun too readily. Both men, one suspects, are destined for a bloody end.
Where is it leading, this tale of a woman who tells a tale of a woman? Into the woods and through the darkness, of course, although the film’s centrepiece story, set in the Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, provides a torch to dimly light our way. Here Adelaide Clemens and Scoot McNairy play Rebecca and Emmett, a hard-bitten farming couple who discover a teenage boy, Caleb, lying prostrate in the snow. Caleb is played by Atticus Affleck, the director’s youngest son, with a vulpine gaucheness which grows more assured and compelling the longer he’s on screen. Caleb tells Rebecca that he is much older than he looks; that he’s been “hither and yon” and visited Argentina and London. When she starts to suspect the boy may be behind a spate of grisly local killings, Caleb’s bleak pronouncements seem hardly designed to dissuade her. “This whole world is tall grass,” he explains. “You have no idea of the dangers underfoot.”
Affleck co-scripted Company alongside Ron Hansen, the author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was made into a fabulous 2007 film by Andrew Dominik. Affleck co-starred as Ford, a snivelling beta male with dark dreams of glory, unsure whether he wants to befriend or kill his idol, and there is a similar scary ambivalence to the character of Caleb, who settles in at the farm and appears in no hurry to leave. Caleb might be a fantasist, bumming for work in the mountains. He might be a demon, blown in from the backwoods or beyond.
As for Affleck, his career has peaked and troughed since those heady days of Jesse James. He won the best actor Oscar for Manchester by the Sea and cropped up as an army intelligence man in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Off-screen, though, he has been dogged by accusations of sexual harassment (subsequently settled out of court) and it is perhaps no coincidence that his passion project is occasionally afflicted by pangs of self-pity and features men who have been wronged and weren’t believed by their peers. The hermit’s wife was killed by an errant, unrepentant physician. Emmett witnessed his father shot dead by a well-connected landowner. The law is a joke; the innocent are kicked to the curb. But these jarring asides stray too close to special pleading. They add little to the narrative; he could have easily cut them out.
Company is better – more satisfying – when it circles back to the fire and picks up the main thread; when it is sticking most closely to reliable American Gothic tropes. Affleck clearly loves this dark sub-genre and elects to play it straight, and his enthusiasm is infectious and embeds us in the yarn. His film is a diversion. Maybe it doesn’t wholly add up. But it contains a ripe gamey flavour with a crunch of buckshot in every bite. Don’t step into the woods after dark, it advises. And if a mysterious stranger taps at your door before dinner, think very carefully before introducing them to your guests.