“HOT SHOTS” LOOKS AT  A MOVIE BY DAN CULBERSON: Take Shelter is an award-winning, critically acclaimed film that just might leave you wondering what all the awards and acclamation was about.

Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain star as Curtis and Samantha LaForche, they have a 6-year-old daughter named Hannah, who is deaf, and they all live in a small town in Ohio.

Curtis is a crew chief for a sand-mining company, but then things start happening to him that causes him to worry enough to go see a doctor. He is having bad dreams in which weird things happen to him and make him take action about them afterwards in his waking life.

Then he starts seeing things and hearing things during the day, which causes him to question his sanity, considering that he is 35 years old and his mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia 25 years earlier when she was 30.

And then one day Curtis says, “I’m thinking about cleaning up that storm shelter out back.”

So, without telling Samantha, he gets a home-improvement loan for $7,000, borrows some equipment from work, and then begins expanding the small storm shelter into a larger, fully equipped bunker for him and his family to wait out the apocalypse that he believes is soon coming.

Curtis articulates this as he is afraid that something “not right” might be coming, he promised himself that he would never leave Samantha and Hannah, and he is doing everything he can to make that come true.

So, are the events that Curtis is experiencing and interfering with his life real or imagined? The audience has to decide that for the time being.

When warning sirens go off and the family hides in the storm shelter to avoid the danger, Curtis doesn’t want to open the door after the danger appears to be over, but Samantha tells him that he has to open the door or else nothing will change.

Now, some critics have said that the final scene in the movie explains everything, but even that is left open for interpretation and speculation.

Take Shelter takes every opportunity to include unnecessary details that just add to the confusion, it is a movie that eventually can cause the audience to question their own sanity, but in the end, you can conclude that it is nothing more than confusion for confusion’s sake.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”