Jeff Nichols’ gritty revenge story Shotgun Stories had its debut at The Berlin Film Festival — a prestigious honor for a film shot with almost no budget in the director’s hometown. But there’s a reason why it has captured the minds of critics and audiences worldwide. It’s a film about envy, greed, brotherhood, and sin, but it’s also an elevated piece of gritty Southern poetry tackling themes as old as the Bible and ones that run just as deep in the roots of the human condition.

The Hayes Brothers

A family revenge story with two sets of brothers with the same father, Shotgun Stories is a vivid parable examining that classic Biblical notion of “the sins of the father” visiting future generations. The story is told mostly from one side, introducing three brothers as the focus: Son, Boy, and Kid Hayes. Son Hayes is married with a small boy in tow, but his wife Annie has just left the house, annoyed that he always lets his brother, Boy, sleep on the living room couch. Boy Hayes is a heavy-set high-school basketball coach spending the summer months living in his monstrous van because, well, it’s just cheaper that way. This leaves Kid, a quiet twenty-something with a beautiful girlfriend who some people think may be a smidge too good for him. The artistry of the screenplay shows when all these seemingly inconsequential details about the three brothers are automatically thrust into a new light when they learn of their absent father’s death; a death by which none of them seem too disheartened.

We never learn about what home life was like when their father was around, but it was bad enough for all of them to hold a heavy grudge. The Hayes brothers attend their father’s funeral, but not with honorable intentions. Arriving late to the rainy afternoon internment, the three of them stand in opposition to the other side of the family as Son lambastes the deceased, saying that no supposed change in the man’s heart or actions could pardon what he did to his first family. The disrespect is too much for the other side of the family to bear and with Son’s disdainful eulogy, a complex hatred between the half-brothers is born and Shotgun Stories changes from a small-scale character piece to a multifarious revenge drama.

There’s plenty of grit to this story, but also an element of classically simple poetry. The images are of the natural: a single bud of cotton framed against a sprouting field or crimson flowers shown in full bloom after what could have been a terrible act of violence. Its in these images that Nichols channels Terrence Malick and his protege David Gordon Green (who produced the film), but while Malick’s films are poetry through and through, Shotgun Stories is more like a Flannery O’Connor short story with some poetic images used to bridge narrative gaps.

Something refreshing about small independent films like Shotgun Stories is how they introduce us to actors we’ve never seen before or, at the most, background performers we’ve never seen in a leading role. Nichols casts not one bad performer in his movie including Michael Shannon playing Son Hayes, looking and acting like a younger, more weathered Robert Redford. Its hard to know whether the other performers are actors by profession at all because they fit so well into the story’s environment without any other performances informing a perception of their acting ability.

Michael Shannon as Son Hayes

In many southern revenge tales the story usually ends in tragedy by means of a fell swoop of violence and rage. Shotgun Stories has violence (although most of it happens off screen) and we see our due share of rage, but it offers something more redemptive in its final act — something hopeful, humane, and beautiful but not stilted or overdrawn. This isn’t Hollywood’s buoyant, rags-to riches, wink-and-a-smile sentimentality that usually comes to head with a music montage of smiling faces and playful children. This redemption relies on what Flannery O’Connor once called “the almost imperceptible intrusion of grace”; the kind which so often hinges on a single action or a solitary hopeful image rising from a cesspool of darkness.

Can revenge ever produce a positive result? Shotgun Stories says no, but it also postulates and proves that grace in the midst of manifold wrongs can drain darkened souls for the better and release them from the clutches of a father’s sin.