Erstwhile Bug paranoiac Michael Shannon plays Son Hayes. He and his brothers Boy (Douglas Ligon) and Kid (Barlow Jacobs) were abandoned by their father and left to the tender mercies of their vile mother. Their existence is barely more than hand-to-mouth, with Son working at a fishery and Boy living out of his van. Dad, meanwhile, started up another family, siring another clutch of brothers headed up by the sensible Cleaman (Michael Abbott, Jr.) and the hotheaded Mark (Travis Smith). These brothers own a farm, but they're hardly well-to-do. When the castoffs show up at their father's funeral, and Son speaks a few indelicate words, old hatreds are brought to the boil. Heated exchanges lead to lethal fights and there is a real question as to whether the feud can be stopped before the two branches of the family wipe each other out.
Despite the violence of the story, the film itself is as restrained and low-key as the performances. Shannon brings to the film the still-waters-running-deep intensity he displayed in the first act of Bug, but this time there is no explosion of shrieking madness. Similarly, almost all actual violence takes place off-screen. Instead, writer/director Jeff Nichols concentrates on providing a gentle, nuanced portrait of lives at the low end of the economic spectrum, a hair's breadth away from outright desperation.
With the warring half-brothers, Nichols gives us the tragedy of fundamentally decent people brought to the point of killing each other for no good reason. And "tragedy" is very much the operative word here, as the events proceed with a terrible Shakespearean inevitability. The pace may be leisurely, but the film never drags. Each scene makes us care more for the characters, even as we constantly expect something awful to take place at any moment. What we have here is a loving exercise in quiet suspense, and a finely detailed character study.
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