In case you were wondering (and you were), Jeff Nichols has the best explanation for the otherwise curious title of his new movie.

“Honestly? All intellectual answers aside, I just thought it was badass,” he says, calling the Straight from New York. “I really just thought it was a cool title. But it was also evocative of the kind of movie I wanted to make. It felt like a midnight drive-in movie; it felt like something I’d buy a ticket to.”

Who’d disagree with that? Midnight Special arrives on the big screen this Friday (April 8) with an almighty buzz and a heavy sense of mystery. Talking to writer-director Nichols has its problems, mind you. Neither of us wants to give too much away about the flick, although media attention so far has been fairly promiscuous with its references to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Nichols hasn’t made this generation’s defining movie about E.T., just so you know, but he’s certainly presenting the tale of an anomolous event and the metaphysical questions it raises, albeit in the always welcome shape of “a sci-fi chase movie”. In the same year that we’ve seen The Witch and Embrace of the Serpent, mainstream Hollywood has followed with a film that takes an earnest look at our assumptions about reality. Seems like something’s in the air, no?

“I don’t know if I’ve ever made a film that’s truly lodged itself in the cultural zeitgeist,” Nichols offers. “I was just talking to a friend about Richard Linklater and how many times that guy has touched the zeitgeist, between Boyhood and Dazed and Confused alone. That’s really impressive. I don’t think my films have qualified yet, but I’m trying to really think about the specifics in my life, and hope that other people will be thinking about those things too. Cause I think that’s how you get at it. I think Take Shelter came close. I was feeling this tremendous anxiety about the world at large, and that was in 2008, 2007, when the economy was really starting to unravel. And I had no information that everyone else didn’t have, but I felt it. You just feel it, out in the world.”

Whatever it is that Nichols’s antenna was looping back into Midnight Special, a crisis of faith—religious, political, scientific, you name it—appears to be at the core. The film begins with Michael Shannon and Joel Edgerton speeding away from a doomsday cult with human cargo that can’t, for some reason, be exposed to light. A bizarre (and beautifully executed) event at a gas station explains why the three fugitives are also being tailed by the NSA (in the shape of a characteristically wry Adam Driver.)

The setup allows Nichols to view his central phenomenon from an array of angles and predispositions, all of them inadequate. In the middle is Shannon, the filmmaker’s alter ego for all four of his features, playing the one guy who treats an inexplicable experience with humble acceptance.

“Roy is an interesting character in that he has made a break from his religious dogma, and that’s a really difficult thing to do,” Nichols says. "But these days we’re getting just enough information about how the universe works, and God particles, and everything else—you get just enough information to realize that there are forces at work here that are beyond our current comprehenshion, you know? Maybe you don’t fall off the map when you sail to the edge. I know, just in my life, I’m thinking about the what-ifs. I’m not buying into anything whole hog, one way or another.”