Company Review: Casey Affleck Somehow Manages to Make a Gothic Horror Mystery Frightfully Boring
Venice Film Festival: The Oscar-winning actor returns with his third directorial effort in this horror drama with Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, and Emily Alyn Lind
by Alex Kaan 12 September 2026
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
When a young woman named Evelyn (Emily Alyn Lind of We Were Liars) shows up uninvited to a Christmas party in 1975, she teases its guests with an epic tale spanning over 70 years. As they ask her to retell it, more and more gather round, sitting enraptured at a story of murder, unlikely relationships, and forgiveness. Despite an intriguing conceit, centred on a mysterious stranger who arrives at a snowy cabin during a series of brutal murders in early 1900s Colorado, Casey Affleck’s Company is an uncomprisingly dull stab at an American Gothic thriller that repeatedly squanders the potential of its folklore and horror elements.
Evelyn’s story begins in 1953 with Tom (Nick Nolte), an ageing hermit who rescues a stranded young actress named Alice (Caylee Cowan) from a blizzard. When Alice can’t sleep, she offers to tell Tom her own story, which becomes the film’s driving narrative. On a similarly stormy night in Tom’s same cabin around half a century ago, as Alice tells him, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens) and her husband Emmett (Scoot McNairy) took in another traveller stuck in a blizzard.
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
In exchange for room and board, they hire the lost teenager, Caleb (played by Affleck’s youngest son, Atticus), to help around their farm and keep watch during the night, given that there have been a series of horrific killings of animals and humans alike, united by the macabre signature of a missing heart. But as Caleb grows closer to Rebecca, it becomes clear that there is an unmistakable darkness within him, and the hosts are forced to ask themselves if they brought a threat into their home.
Beginning with a comically complex Russian doll framework that barely justifies its existence, Company makes for such frustrating viewing because its attempts to articulate the power of storytelling are so heavy-handed that any hint of a compelling campfire tale is voided, creating a nagging urge to put out the flames and walk away. The scenes are ponderous, defined by long conversations and excessive dialogue gesturing to undercooked, world-weary themes of regret and forgiveness. While Nolte, Clemens, and Ben Mendelsohn, who plays a gruff neighbour in the early 1900s timeline, can rescue the material to a degree, Affleck and Ron Hansen’s writing sets its cast up to struggle, with some wooden performances that feel markedly outmatched by the three aforementioned actors.
Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival
There is also a significant twist that reframes the meaning of the entire film, and explains why Rebecca puts up with Caleb for so long despite the fact that he is a frankly terrible hired hand and so transparently sinister that it becomes comedic. The twist introduces an interesting idea, but its late arrival makes for a jarring turn rather than a thrilling revelation.
If Company has a saving grace, it is its charming Gothic atmosphere of a punishing American winter, captured with a meditative stillness and enhanced with composer Daniel Hart’s soaring strings. Underneath everything, there is a good film here, but Affleck can’t seem to find it through his convoluted framework.
At once overwrought in its presentation and underdeveloped in its substance, Company is a dreary, vexing misfire that makes its 92-minute runtime feel far too long.