Watched: Mud
This is unmissable, and that’s not a word I use lightly - I’m kicking myself for not seeing it sooner. Matthew McConaughey is brilliant as Mud, a washed-up vagrant with a mysterious past, but the real people to shine in this story are Tye Sheridan as Ellis and Jacob Lofland as the brilliantly named Neckbone. Both are children who are realised brilliantly, full of the casual coarseness you expect out of kids. Jeff Nichols (who writes and directs) has perfectly captured the awkward posturing and bravado that comes with being a kid in a grown-up world, never condescending and always committing to realizing the story through Ellis’s eyes.
Part of the way this comes across is in the mystical sensibility that creeps in the edges of the film. There’s nothing aggressively overt about any of it, but there are touches - like how Mud has a tendency to always appear out of the shadows, or how the forests seem to breathe with their own energy, or even the Satanic overtones that filter in when a group of bounty hunters come to town. There’s also a curious sense of place - home in this film is always down by the river, but a substantial part takes place in the nearby town, where locations are always shot in isolation, never quite their own thing.
As with Take Shelter, the ending of this film might prove divisive; rather than wallow in ambiguity, Nichols has a tendency to provide an emotional payoff upfront instead. All that said, there’s a few lingering final shots toward the end that are simply breathtaking, and a sense of catharsis that would be hard to achieve without an ending as concrete as this film has.