Jeff Nichols’ Mud is a gorgeous looking tale of love, masculinity and coming-of-age. With echoes of Huckleberry Finn and Stand By Me and featuring a man called Mud and a boy called Neckbone, this archetypal bayou noir story unfolds with a languor befitting its swampy Southern setting.

Matthew McConaughey continues his career-altering run of Bernie, Killer Joe and Magic Mike by playing the titular character; a spiritual and leather-skinned fugitive living lonely as a Wordsworthian cloud on an island on the Arkansas stretch of the Mississippi river. He strikes up an unlikely relationship with the idealistic young Ellis (Tye Sheridan, The Tree Of Life) and smart-mouthed Neckbone (River Phoenix doppelgänger Jacob Lofland.) For vulnerable Ellis whose parents (the brilliant Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon) are on the verge of splitting, the real draw is reuniting Mud with his long-time love, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and proving that love exists, and can last forever.
Nichols creates an exquisite juxtaposition of realism and fancy, as Ellis escapes his cramped, shabby houseboat for the romance of the open water and Mud’s adopted home of a boat lodged high in a tree – a dream-like clubhouse in which a young boy’s imagination can play.
Nichols’ pacing becomes self-indulgent, however, and the climax is an action-fuelled misstep. It jars with the beautifully straightforward philosophy and aesthetic of the film, which until that point is as slowly seductive as that big ol’ river.