When Jeff Nichols set out to make 2016’s Midnight Special, his intention was to create a film about parenthood, the feelings of powerlessness that come with it, and the faith required to let your child be their own person in the world. When his son had a seizure at 8 months old, Nichols realized that he “had no real control over the health and well-being of [his] child.” Nichols took this emotional truth as the core of what he called a “weird, hybrid child” of films like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he grew up watching. Just as in those movies and more modern Amblin releases like Super 8, Midnight Special revolves around a child holding a supernatural secret, pitted against the controlling forces of the government that are hellbent on stopping the kid from exposing the secret/discovering their freedom.
Midnight Special is chock full of such energy, but Nichols’ movie stands out in major ways. By dialing back the sometimes zany pace of those films and replacing it with understated character growth that is empathetic toward — or at least fleshes out — the parents’ views, he creates something completely different. You’ll never look at the bumbling parents in E.T. the same way again.
