Casey Affleck's 'Company': Muted Vampire Western at Venice — SkimNews
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- Casey Affleck's 'Company' premiered in competition at Venice, presented as a period heartland vampire movie unfolding across three nested eras (1903, 1953, and 1975) connected by a recurring stranger invited into unsuspecting homes
- Atticus Affleck, Casey Affleck's teenage son, takes the demanding lead role of drifter Caleb in the 1903 storyline, with the review comparing his features and affect to "the love child of Timothée Chalamet and Troye Sivan"
- The production credits a striking eight directors of photography, including Masanobu Takayanagi, Adam Arkapaw, and Marcell Rév, though the reviewer finds no distinct visual aesthetic across the enfolded narratives
- Co-written with Ron Hansen, who authored the source novel for 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' and the screenplay for 'The World to Come,' both of which starred Affleck
- Supporting cast includes Nick Nolte (as 1953 widower Tom), Emily Alyn Lind (1975's Evelyn), Adelaide Clemens, Scoot McNairy, Caylee Cowan, and Ben Mendelsohn, whom the review calls "by several notches the ensemble's MVP" as a caustic neighboring farmer
- The review judges the film distinctly less assured than Affleck's 2019 debut 'Light of My Life,' calling the twist that reveals its vampire identity "ludicrous" and saying it 'adds no great urgency' to proceedings
- The piece positions 'Company' alongside 'Sinners' as another recent period vampire film but criticizes it for peddling 'wildly divergent vampire lore' framing bloodthirsty raconteurs as capable of grace when treated with mercy
Why it matters: The muted Venice reception and the reviewer's warning that the film's genre identity is its only marketable hook create a real distribution problem — 'Company' presents a significant challenge to marketing teams because anyone who knows the twist going in faces a 'protracted shaggy-dog tease' in its first two-thirds, making the film's festival-to-release path unusually fraught for an Affleck-directed title.
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