‘Company’ review: Casey Affleck directs, co-writes and stars in atmospheric but convoluted slice of American Gothic

Dir. Casey Affleck. Canada/USA 2026. 92 mins

When a film opens with a voice-over that starts, “The Persian mystic wrote…,”  the concern is that you may be in for high earnestness. In all fairness, Casey Affleck does at least intermittently bring a light touch to Company, his 1970s-set philosophically-flavoured essay in American Gothic, but the convoluted trick-box narrative is likely to leave viewers in the cold before we reach a payoff which shifts from one delicate area of the fantastic to a much more familiar generic one. Some vivid performances – not least from the always welcome veteran Nick Nolte – hold the attention, but this Venice competition title doesn’t feel solid enough to make an enduring mark.

The script can rarely resist the obvious, and is excessively trimmed with arch literary embellishment

The film begins in 1975 as a mysterious young woman in black (Emily Alyn Lind) knocks on the door of a suburban house, claiming to be lost. She’s invited to join the Christmas party in progress and, introducing herself as Evelyn, begins telling a story about the death of an old man named Tom. He’s played by a mightily grizzled and bearded Nick Nolte, whose Colorado cabin solitude, back in 1953, is interrupted when he sees a young woman, Alice (Caylee Cowan), lying in the snow outside his cabin.

After Tom rescues Alice, she starts telling him another story, this time about a farming couple in 1903, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens, currently in TV’s R.J. Decker) and Emmett (Scoot McNairy). They, too, rescue a snowbound stray, a young man named Caleb (the director’s son Atticus Affleck), who they retain on the farm as a watchman, given the area’s mysterious spate of human and animal killings. Caleb proves to be a very strange young man indeed, defiant and crackling with barely suppressed rage – and a spinner of tall tales about his wanderings far and wide. These stories can’t but carry echoes of the self-mythologising yarns that the young Bob Dylan famously used to purvey – something suggested by the use of Dylan’s deathless ‘Shelter From the Storm’ to bookend the film. 

There are more stories-within-stories to come, told by and relating to the pasts of several of these characters, and there’s often nicely disorienting slippage between them. Mystery piles on mystery – not least surrounding the reasons why the sullen, Hamlet-quoting Caleb is so incorrigibly petulant. The overall premise is fertile, at least as long as it is able to suggest resonances rather than spell them out. But the script can rarely resist the obvious, and is also excessively trimmed with arch literary embellishment.

Affleck’s co-writer is novelist Ron Hansen, whose The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was memorably filmed in 2007 by Andrew Dominik, with Affleck in the Ford role. There are lines here which might conceivably work on the printed page but make a ghastly clang in actors’ mouths, especially when spelling out the film’s themes in bold block capitals (“The spirit of death was speaking to him in the coded messages of a human story”).

All credit to the cast for inserting some approachable humanity, even when playing evidently unreal embodiments of mystery. McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, as a cynical farmer, give their reliable best; Clemens shines as a quiet, dignified homesteader who could have stepped out of a John Ford movie; and Affleck Jr, whose brother Indiana Affleck also appears, makes a more than creditable screen debut as an enigmatic tyke who keeps you guessing even when you most feel he deserves a slap.

That the film was shot piecemeal over the seasons accounts for the fact that different crews are credited for different sections of story, along with four editors and multiple DoPs, including eminences such as Masanobu Takayanagi and Adam Arkapaw, as well as Affleck himself. That the film holds together as a unified piece is a tribute to the photography – there are some genuinely eerie scenes of snowy landscapes by day and night, with hints of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller – as well as the varied, deeply atmospheric period design by Stefania Cella. It’s all done with meticulous devotion and some delicacy, but sceptical viewers are likely to part Company before the payoff drops with a hefty thunk of genre predictability.