Casey Affleck’s Company plays like a grown-up bedside storyteller: a series of short, gothic episodes framed as campfire tales that trade in superstition, murder and human oddities. Premiering at the Venice film festival, the film stitches together multiple yarns in a deliberately theatrical style, moving from one eerie vignette to the next with a storyteller’s relish.
The film opens in familiar territory — a mysterious stranger arrives on a dark winter night and takes a seat to spin a tale. From that opening hook, the narrative drifts backwards through time: December 1975 blurs into 1953 and then 1903, before the frame finally shifts across the Atlantic to a story set at the end of the plague. The structure is episodic and cumulative, each tale sparked by the embers of its predecessor.
There is much to enjoy in Affleck’s approach: an appetite for period detail, an affection for offbeat characters and a willingness to embrace the macabre. Performances include established names, and moments such as a hermit living in a shack — played by Nick Nolte, who portrays a man pining for his lost daughter — stick in the memory. The film revels in small human oddities as much as in plot twists.
At the same time, Company occasionally feels self-conscious in its strangeness. Several elements read as eccentricities that might have been lifted from a catalogue of gothic tropes, leaving parts of the film feeling slightly laundered rather than wholly original. Still, for viewers who welcome deliberate theatricality and a steady diet of creepy, cracker‑barrel storytelling, Affleck’s anthology is an engaging and diverting piece of filmmaking.