Venice Review: Casey Affleck Tells Dull Tall Tales With Company

To say what Casey Affleck’s Company is really about is to spoil its major twist. It’s not a Sondheim thing, I can tell you that. But outside of setting and framework, there’s not much else I can divulge about plot. The film takes place across several generations of Americans who end up visitors in a stranger’s home with a story to tell. À la Inception, the stories within stories go deeper and deeper as the protagonists within tales tell tales that the person telling that tale must tack onto the larger tale they’re telling their rapt audience—a family at Christmas in the 1950s, a lone Nick Nolte slowly dying in his cabin in the wilderness, or a respectable religious couple living a meek Wild West life. 

The person telling tales is a bit peculiar in each case: all random people who show up outside someone’s house in various states of consciousness, never in a hurry to get somewhere. Most of the stories take place in that fraught, gothic American period when people would just come upon new houses and feel things out with no idea as to whether the encounter would make their fortunes, ruin their lives, or be a forgettably polite flash in the pan. The presence of the guests is preceded by a Jalaluddin Rumi poem, “The Guest House,” that stays thematically present throughout and whose words keep finding their way back into the story:

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

As each guide from the beyond tells their story, and that nested story becomes about telling another nested story, one starts to wonder what Company is all about, when the real narrative will actually begin. And one of substance needs to begin when the stories being told don’t have much going for them as mere conduits for other stories that are mere conduits. We eventually figure out what it’s all about, but the mildly satisfying reveal doesn’t justify the lack of intrigue that dominates the movie up to this point. It is, credit where due, an unexpected twist from Affleck. As we learned with I’m Still Here, he loves to trick an audience.

Affleck has 31 years of acting under his belt, but this is only the third feature he’s written and directed. He started working behind the camera fifteen years in, and his films have come with seven- and nine-year gaps in between. The other two—a vile, fascinating Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary that the jury is still out on and a feel-good post-apocalyptic father-daughter drama—are nothing like Company, which vibrates at an Old Western period piece register, toys with genre, and leaves little to lambast or write home about in terms of filmmaking craft.

It wasn’t a bad idea for Affleck to team with co-writer Ron Hansen. The scribe behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The World to Come—both Old West Casey Affleck pictures—has two strong cases of bringing a very believable primeval American West to life in cinema, making him the right man for the job. You can feel the vibrations of Affleck’s past acting work in the Old West arena. Whether written into the screenplay or merely directed by Affleck, the bevy of tall grass shots captured through warped windows harkens back to Jesse James, and the hushed nature of its home life seeps in from The World to Come.

There’s the occasional quote worth ruminating on (“crave normalcy, and the thirst for wrongdoing will pass like a fever”). But usually, 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 premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.