Casting Michael Shannon as a potential psychotic is a bit like crowing over the discovery that water is wet. And sure enough, in Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, Shannon gets his chance to go all bug-eyed and thin-lipped, to sweat through his clothes, to go ballistic on the neighbors, warning them that a big storm is coming and it’s going to wipe them out if they don’t get ready.

Shannon has certainly cornered the cuckoo-bird market, and how you feel about Take Shelter will depend largely on how you respond to his patented nutcase technique. But in terms of overall filmmaking, writer-director Nichols — who previously made the 2007 Shotgun Stories — knows what he’s doing. He’s so adept at layering eerie semi-naturalistic details — skies that seem to be glowering at the whole human race, rain beating down with the fury of millions of tiny, punishing fists — that I wanted to stick with him to see where he was going with it all. His idea — that nature is both inside and outside of us, and in neither case is it something to trifle with — is unsettling at its core. Shannon is precisely the actor you’d first think to cast in this material — which may be the problem.

Shannon’s character, a hardworking Midwestern family man named Curtis, has been having apocalyptic dreams and visions: Birds arrange themselves strange formations in the sky; yellow rain falls from above, as if God were expressing his dissatisfaction with mankind by taking one giant whiz all…