Take Shelter

Curtis, a working husband and father in rural Ohio, is beset by vivid nightmares and waking visions of a coming catastrophe. As he secretly builds and expands a storm shelter, straining his marriage and his job, he cannot tell whether he is receiving a warning or descending into the schizophrenia that hospitalised his mother.

The film sits inside the uncertainty between prophecy and illness, dramatising the terror of an inherited breakdown and the difficulty of trusting one's own perception. It gives a therapist a careful account of prodromal fear and family risk. It was selected for competition at Sundance in 2011.