Casey Affleck's second feature as writer-director, "Company," premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival but has left critics unconvinced, with Variety's review calling it a "perversely ponderous exercise in hide-the-genre" that takes over an hour to reveal its true nature. The film disguises itself as a folk-flavoured meditation on storytelling before shifting into genre territory via a twist that critics found underwhelming and slow to arrive, making it a difficult prospect for any distributor considering picking it up.

The story unfolds across three nested timelines, each involving a mysterious stranger unsettling a household: in 1975, a young woman named Evelyn (Emily Alyn Lind) turns up at a Christmas party and begins telling a story; that story, set in 1953, features widower Tom (Nick Nolte) and stranger Alice (Caylee Cowan); which in turn nests a tale from 1903 about farming couple Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens) and Emmett (Scoot McNairy), who take in a drifter, Caleb, played by Affleck's own teenage son, Atticus. The review notes the film echoes the revisionist Western tone of Affleck's earlier acting work and was co-written with Ron Hansen, but ultimately finds the layered structure tedious and the pacing "molasses," concluding it falls short of Affleck's 2019 directorial debut, "Light of My Life."