Company review – Casey Affleck entertains us with creepy campfire tales

Venice film festival: Affleck’s third film as a director is a diverting gothic anthology about mysterious strangers, murder and – pointedly – wronged men

Gather ye ’round the glowing screen for a Casey Affleck campfire tale. It contains superstitions and murder and human oddities of all stripes. An old hermit in his shack. Something nasty in the woodshed. If you like the first tale, fill your boots, settle back, because here comes another and another; each sparked by the embers of its neighbour and playing out with the same deliberately theatrical panache. Affleck’s picture roams and rambles like a creepy cracker-barrel Jackanory.

Actually there is much to relish in Company, Affleck’s third film as a director, even if many of its elements feel like off-the-peg eccentricities; a little too laundered and self-consciously strange. It begins in tried and tested fashion with the arrival of a mysterious stranger on a dark winter’s night. The stranger takes a seat and spins a tale, at which point December 1975 melts into 1953, then 1903, before finally the film crosses the ocean to Europe at the tail end of the plague. Nick Nolte is a hermit pining for his lost daughter, while Ben Mendelsohn plays a mean, mordant farmer who reaches for his handgun too readily. Both men, one suspects, are destined for a bloody end.