Critic's Notebook

83rd Venice International Film Festival

The Venice Film Festival has always been unusually hospitable to horror, having premiered Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” just last year. The competition this time includes two more horror films, “Company” and “The Spiral,” though both are coy about their affiliations, withholding their genre credentials until late in the game. Each is interesting and technically accomplished enough to justify its place in competition. It is the festival’s other choices that are harder to ignore. “Company” is directed by Casey Affleck, an accused sexual harasser. The classics sidebar, meanwhile, includes Roman Polanski’s “Cul-de-sac.” It would appear that #MeToo is over, at least in Venice.

“Company” opens with Evelyn (Emily Alyn Lind) arriving by taxi, in pouring rain, at a house she believes belongs to the Benedict family. Though she apparently has the wrong address, she is nonetheless invited inside to dry off and join the Christmas party already under way. She entertains the guests with a story supposedly passed down by her grandmother: in the 1950s, Tom (Nick Nolte), an old man nearing death, discovers Alice (Caylee Cowan) unconscious in the snow and drags her into his remote cabin. She had been accidentally left behind when a passenger train, stalled by inclement weather, resumed its journey without her.

The setup has the pleasantly uncanny quality of a fireside tale: strangers arrive out of the wilderness, the elements isolate them from the outside world, and hospitality becomes an obligation whose consequences are not yet clear. But Evelyn’s story soon opens onto another story, creating a kind of oral tradition nested within an oral tradition. A married couple, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens) and Emmett (Scoot McNairy), discover an unconscious young man in the snow and likewise bring him into their home. When he awakens, Caleb (Atticus Affleck) offers them something that is less a story than an evasion. He tells them almost nothing about himself, except that a bear frightened his horse while he was traveling East to find work with relatives. Despite Caleb’s distinctly antisocial air, Rebecca inexplicably offers him room, board and employment as a watchman, following rumors of attacks on people and livestock in the surrounding area.

Rebecca’s story gradually becomes the dominant one, and “Company” settles into an increasingly claustrophobic rhythm as the household tries to accommodate a stranger whose presence seems to upset the precarious balance of its isolated existence. Director Affleck and cowriter Ron Hansen are clearly interested in the slipperiness of storytelling itself: what gets passed down, what gets embellished, what gets omitted and, perhaps most importantly, what motivates someone to tell a story in the first place. The film keeps moving backward and forward between its three narratives, allowing details to echo across generations without immediately explaining their significance.

That withholding is central to the film’s design. “Company” drops breadcrumbs early on, including graphically rendered deaths of humans and animals, but remains deliberately evasive about what kind of movie it is. The violence registers initially as an ominous intrusion into what might otherwise be a period drama or an anthology of supernatural-tinged folk tales. Only near the end does the film reveal its hand, announcing itself not merely as horror but as a particular kind of horror. Since the film has only just premiered and its press notes are also vague, it would be ungenerous to spoil the revelation here.

The problem is that the film’s coyness eventually begins to feel less like suspense than self-congratulation. Messrs. Affleck and Hansen have constructed a puzzle box in which every narrative seems designed to make the viewer ask how the pieces fit together. The eventual connections are clever, and some of them are genuinely satisfying. But the pleasure of solving a puzzle is necessarily finite. Once the pieces are assembled, a film needs to offer something beyond the pleasure of having assembled them.

“Company” comes tantalizingly close to doing so. Its stories are all concerned, in different ways, with the transmission of experience: one person telling another what happened before, one generation handing down a story to the next, one stranger entering an established household carrying a past that cannot quite be articulated. The film repeatedly suggests that stories survive because they contain some warning or necessity — that people tell them because there is something at stake in being heard. Yet when the three timelines finally converge, that premise remains frustratingly underdeveloped.

The filmmaking is considerably more assured. The cinematography, credited to no fewer than eight cinematographers, gives the different periods distinctive visual textures without sacrificing a sense of continuity. Snow, darkness and isolated interiors become recurring elements rather than mere period trappings, making the characters seem increasingly cut off from any world beyond the frame. Four credited editors deftly braid the three timelines together as well, maintaining a narrative architecture that could easily have collapsed under its own weight. The film knows exactly when to withhold information and when to let a seemingly insignificant detail acquire new meaning.

What it does not know, however, is quite what that information is ultimately for.

After the central revelation, the most basic question remains unanswered: why, exactly, does each storyteller choose to tell her story at that particular moment, and under those particular circumstances? The question matters because “Company” has made storytelling itself its organizing principle. If the stories are merely elaborate vehicles for a twist, then their elaborate nesting begins to look like ornament. If they are meant to illuminate something about memory, inheritance, trauma or the human impulse to turn experience into narrative, the film never quite articulates it.

This leaves “Company” in an awkward position. It is too meticulously made to dismiss, too structurally clever to call inept, and too invested in the significance of storytelling to let its narrative evasions pass as mere atmosphere. The craftsmanship is real; so is the suspense. But the film seems so pleased with the intricacy of its construction that it mistakes concealment for substance. Its nested narratives are ingenious, but ingenuity is not the same thing as meaning.

In the end, “Company” tells us a great deal about how its stories fit together, but remarkably little about why they needed to be told at all. Its craftsmanship ultimately proves more substantial than its substance.