Midnight Special is a 2016 American science fiction film written and directed by Jeff Nichols, and produced by Sarah Green and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones.

The film stars Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Jaeden Martell, and Sam Shepard.

At the Ranch, a religious cult in rural Texas, Pastor Calvin Meyer dispatches two of his parishioners to retrieve Alton.

NSA communications analyst Paul Sevier asks Calvin how numbers sent via encoded satellite transmissions made their way into his sermons.

As Alton's powers grew, his mother Sarah abandoned him, and members of the Ranch have been raising him, with Pastor Meyer as his adoptive father.

After a violent confrontation with a state trooper, Roy and Lucas seek cover at the home of Elden, a former Ranch member.

Having deduced their destination from Calvin's sermons, Sevier warns the fugitives that there is a 5-mile security perimeter around the location on the Florida panhandle.

Roy and Lucas lead the Army on a wild goose chase while Alton and Sarah reach the edge of a swamp.

Sarah, apparently walking away from her past life forever, cuts off her cult-traditionalist hair braid in a local gas station.

The site's consensus reads, "Midnight Special's intriguing mysteries may not resolve themselves to every viewer's liking, but the journey is ambitious, entertaining, and terrifically acted.

Club described the "Spielberg-esque" science fiction chase film as "more of a genre piece than anything Nichols has done, carried by its steady momentum and its engrossing sense of mystery."

[19] Benjamin Lee, writing for The Guardian, felt that Nichols was "making a concerted effort to stake his claim as a hit-maker" but that the film lacks "Spielbergian magic", leaving it "disappointingly lifeless".