Jeff Nichols movies are worth the wait.

In discussing Midnight Special, all I’ll talk about is what’s provided on the poster: there’s a kid whose eyes glow, there are scenes involving cars, and a good chunk of it takes place at night. Also, I hope Kirsten Dunst sent her agent a fruit basket.

It’s a fantastic movie, worth the full New York City ticket price, and I’d love to see it again. It trusted me as an attentive viewer, it committed to its vision and story and never once flinched or winked at the audience, and on a personal level, it hit so many of my narrative kinks I left the theater shaking and grinning.

But the one thing that still bugs me about it, almost a week later, is that they never gave a clear explanation why it had to be about a boy. Compare to Looper, where it would have made so much more sense, on so many levels from the symbolic to the narrative to the logical extrapolation of what men and women are shown to be capable of in that movie’s world, for Sidney to have been a girl instead of a boy.

There were some hints throughout the movie, a couple of allusions to things past that, when taken together, seem to point to a very clear reason why the movie had to be about Alton and not, say, Emma. It wasn’t stated outright and is more speculation on my part than anything else, and it could have taken four lines and sixty words, probably less, to provide that explanation.

That said, I understand why Nichols shied away from doing so, as this movie trusted the audience to pay attention and put things together themselves, which is no mean feat. It would have changed the tone of the movie a great deal if it was about Emma instead of Alton, and I’d be fascinated to watch that movie. I realize it’s entirely possible Nichols wrote about a boy because he has a son, so he was sticking to what he knew - and the thematic tone of the movie is very in keeping with that.

Basically, this is a movie I want fandom to remember come Yuletide, because there’s a lot to work with - both for what is and isn’t there.