Company

What Affleck has created is an enticing work. It’s flawed but speaks well to just how those points of conflict within the stories we tell have the most meaning at the exact moment they are uttered. It is there in which the truth really exists.

Despite its mere 92-minute runtime, its shadowy, eye-catching tableaus extend for lengthy stretches without conjuring much meaning — or at least, without meaning appropriate to its characters’ sprawling, novelistic dialogue. These result in some stellar performances, but they end up in service of a tale whose inflexible form is so paramount to its telling as to be self-defeating, rather than self-reflexive.

The overall premise is fertile, at least as long as it is able to suggest resonances rather than spell them out. But the script can rarely resist the obvious, and is also excessively trimmed with arch literary embellishment.

Company is by no means a total wash; it’s nice to look at and eventually (though, it’s a long wait) the plot does take on a compelling momentum.

Stories are nested within stories to steadily diminishing returns in Company, a perversely ponderous exercise in hide-the-genre that takes more than an hour to reveal what its game really is.

Purportedly, this gothic drama is about the limits of human compassion and the inevitable futility of revenge, but in reality, “Company” serves better as a test for the limits of audience patience due to its irritating habit of interrupting its own narrative.

By the time events take a supernatural turn in the final stretch, “Company” has lost the thread of its ambitions and ideas. In a film so invested in folkloric fabulism and oral tradition, the detour itself is not especially far-fetched. Yet what should jolt the narrative—or, at the very least, snap it into focus—only reinforces how far the movie has drifted from the humanistic notions of forgiveness and generosity Affleck seems determined to explore.