I’m going to be proactive, and hyper-cautious, and issue a major spoiler warning right at the top of this review of Casey Affleck’s third directorial effort, Company. It’s impossible to talk about the movie without giving away a crucial element of the picture, which was kept quite hidden from press here in Venice. If you’d like to go into the film (whenever it’s released) as blind as I was, then read no further.
Company has been billed as a mystery-drama involving interconnected stories spread across multiple decades. In the 1970s, a woman who’s lost her way essentially crashes a convivial Christmas party. There she tells a story about an old man (Nick Nolte, doing his thing) who lives a solitary life in the snowy wilds of Colorado in 1953. A woman arrives at his remote cabin and tells him another story, about a couple taking in a wayward teen somewhere in the mountains in the early 1900s. In that section, gruesome murders have spooked what few locals there are, and the boy, Caleb (Atticus Affleck), has a shifty, older-than-his years air about him that makes farmer Emmett (Scoot McNairy) quite unsettled. But his wife, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens), is intrigued by this new figure in her life, drawn to him in a manner that is not quite maternal but seems in some other way concerned and protective.
