Critic Reviews

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.

Company is better – more satisfying – when it circles back to the fire and picks up the main thread; when it is sticking most closely to reliable American Gothic tropes. Affleck clearly loves this dark sub-genre and elects to play it straight, and his enthusiasm is infectious and embeds us in the yarn.

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.

There’s not enough meat on Company’s bones to sink our teeth into. Affleck and Hansen’s Russian doll experiment is just that: a dull formal exercise.

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.

Affleck has a feel for composition, and the evocative imagery at times hints at something the narrative fails to. Even so, it’s not quite enough. A movie that tells us to embrace sadness and meanness as well as joy and wonder should at least have some joy and wonder in it, not just sadness and meanness.

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 quickly outwears its welcome, existing in a vacuum where its human characters are boring nonentities, merely grist for the mill on a conveyor belt racing to unleash both the essence of melancholy and agony, neither of which Affleck properly distinguishes.

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.

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.