‘Company’ Review: Casey Affleck’s Ponderous Philosophical Triptych

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. 

So let’s do a little rundown of what we know so far: People choose to bring mysterious strangers into their homes, one of them seems a little more mature than he ought to be, and there are brutal killings of livestock and human beings preceding the arrival of one of these individuals. Are you seeing the pattern here? Does this sound like any movies you’ve seen before? Yes indeed, Company is — quite surprisingly! — a vampire movie, though that word is never said aloud. This came as quite a shock to me, having thought I was instead in store for some kind of gritty Western fable. I suppose the film is that in its way, but it has a more supernatural, metaphysical bent than what was advertised.

Watching the film, I found myself wondering if Affleck, who wrote the film with Ron Hansen, was inspired by any recent-ish vampire narratives. I detected traces of the Mike Flanagan series Midnight Mass in there; Company has a similar penchant for long stories and fancy philosophical talk. There’s also a tinge of Goran Stolevski’s ravishing 2022 period piece You Won’t Be Alone, which isn’t exactly about a vampire but concerns another kind of undying creature moving through the world and learning things about existence. Like that superlative film, Company seeks to use the tragedy and allure of agelessness to explore matters of the soul: grief, vengeance, forgiveness, longing. 

The film aspires to be elevated genre filmmaking, mixing old Americana and monsters. At times, Company almost plays like Train Dreams with vampires, dreamy and sad and laden with voiceover. But as was also true of that Oscar-nominated film, Company is more ponderous than profound. Affleck’s attempt to bind these three narratives into some grand conclusion, or lesson, about the state of being alive in the world is muddled and overwrought, full of clunky poetry that seems to think abstraction and repetition are keys to meaning. It’s far too easy to lose one’s train of thought while trying to follow what any given scene is saying, not because the writing is so sophisticated, but because it keeps meandering and looping back on itself. 

I admire that Affleck wanted to take a swing this big, and some of his directorial skill is on display here. He’s got a keen eye for visuals, for perspective and shadow. And he’s coaxed fine performances out of McNairy, Clemens and Ben Mendelsohn, who plays a fellow farmer highly suspicious of Caleb’s piercing gaze and cocky posture. Company is by no means a total wash; it’s nice to look at and eventually (though, it’s a long wait) the plot does take on a compelling momentum. 

The biggest question mark of the film is the performance of Affleck’s son, Atticus, who does his best Chalamet (they look remarkably similar from certain angles, especially when lit by fireplace glow) as the eerily charming but sinister Caleb. This is his first acting job and it’s a big one; he’s tasked with helping to define the entire mood and ethos of the film, and I’m not sure he’s yet up to that mighty job. At least not with the tortured, stilted dialogue that so frequently plagues Company. He has an interesting presence, exuding a sort of forlorn menace that does indeed feel very vampire-y in that doomed poet, Anne Rice-ian way. I suspect we will see him in more things to come, inevitably hounded by the Chalamet comparison. But he makes too many missteps in Company to call it a successful debut. On the nepotistic casting spectrum, he fares far better than Sofia Coppola in The Godfather Part III — or Cody Horn in Magic Mike (remember that??) — but he was perhaps given too much to handle too soon. 

Such is the unwieldy ambition of Affleck’s film. It takes on a lot — and asks a lot of at least one of its actors — that it ultimately can’t manage. Had the script been edited down to something more legible (and, frankly, engaging), maybe we wouldn’t so much mind the wobbly performance at its center. But this family project has lofty goals in mind and has charged recklessly at them. It clatters as it goes, more rickety than stately, and too often quite dull. Really, the most energizing part of the movie is its surprise subject matter. So, oops, maybe you should have stopped reading this after the first paragraph.