Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 8

Casey Affleck’s 3rd Film 'Company' Delivers Creepy Gothic Tales as Review Faults Self-Conscious Detours

Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 8

Casey Affleck’s 3rd Film 'Company' Delivers Creepy Gothic Tales as Review Faults Self-Conscious Detours

Q: Why did Casey Affleck cast his own son as a mysterious drifter linked to grisly murders in his new film?

Casey Affleck cast his son Atticus as the drifter Caleb largely because Atticus proved right for the part during repeated script read-throughs at home, not because the role was designed in advance as a family casting choice. Affleck said he was still trying to fill the younger roles while in pre-production and had hired casting director Avy Kaufman. During those home rehearsals, Atticus and his older brother Indiana read the teenage parts and, by Affleck’s account, were “fantastic.” Those informal sessions effectively became auditions. He has also said he “did not want to put them in the movie” initially, but once they showed they could do it and were willing to appear, he cast them. Practical timing also helped. Atticus, who makes his screen debut in Company, had about a week of spring break from high school, and Affleck said that was roughly all the production needed from him for Caleb’s scenes. Indiana had more time and stayed on set longer, even helping the crew with jobs such as shoveling snow and carrying equipment. Affleck has described directing his sons as deeply personal and said they grew up around filmmaking and had an “innate understanding” of a set. He called working with them “the best professional experience of my life by far.” So the casting appears to have come from a mix of performance fit, availability and the film’s unusually intimate, family-centered production.

Q: How does a mysterious teen's chilling secret connect a 1975 gathering to plague-era Europe in Casey Affleck's gothic anthology?

It connects them through a nested chain of storytelling centered on Caleb, the teenage drifter whose identity and past seem far older and darker than they appear. In *Company*, the frame begins at a 1975 holiday gathering, where an uninvited woman, Evelyn, arrives on a stormy night and tells the guests a story. Her tale moves back to 1953, when a lonely mountain hermit shelters a stranded young actress. That woman then tells another story, which becomes the film’s main chapter: in about 1903, farming couple Rebecca and Emmett take in Caleb after finding him collapsed in the snow. Caleb is the key link because he is not presented as an ordinary boy. He claims to be much older than he looks, spins improbable stories about far-off places, and becomes the focus of suspicion as grisly killings spread through the frontier. Reviews and festival coverage indicate that the anthology’s final reveals push his secret beyond local mystery and backward across centuries, carrying the story all the way to plague-era Europe. So the connection is not a literal jump from one period to another by plot mechanics alone, but a storytelling chain in which each stranger’s tale opens the door to an earlier one, with Caleb’s uncanny, possibly supernatural history acting as the bridge that ties the 1975 party to the film’s medieval plague chapter.

3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 8

Company is framed as a chain of campfire-style stories that jump from 1975 to 1953, 1903 and plague-era Europe, with the review praising its theatrical American Gothic mood more than its overall cohesion.
The film’s strongest section centers on a Rockies farm couple—played by Adelaide Clemens and Scoot McNairy—who take in a teenage drifter, Caleb, after grisly local killings begin to shadow him.
Nick Nolte and Ben Mendelsohn appear in other blood-tinged episodes, while Atticus Affleck, the director’s youngest son, is singled out for a performance that grows more compelling as the story darkens.
The review says Affleck and co-writer Ron Hansen weaken the film with self-pitying side notes about disbelieved, wronged men, but finds Company more satisfying when it sticks to familiar Gothic menace.
As Affleck’s 3rd outing as a director, the film is ultimately judged an uneven but flavorful diversion, driven by his evident affection for the dark Americana subgenre.