Four films into his career, writer-director Jeff Nichols seems incapable of making a bad movie, or even an uninteresting one. At a time when most indie filmmakers gauge success by the speed of their graduation from low-budget features to Marvel blockbusters, this 37-year-old auteur is instead skipping around genres and continuing to make distinct, region-specific tales. The latest is his first film released through a major studio, but it feels as personal as any of his previous works. Starting with 2007’s small-town drama Shotgun Stories, then moving on to 2011’s searing character study Take Shelter and the following year’s coming-of-age thriller Mud, Nichols has repeatedly explored the tenuous bonds that hold families together. Midnight Special is no different, even though it just so happens to be a science-fiction thriller.

The film throws us headfirst into the middle of its story, confident that we’re bright enough to piece together what’s happening. Nichols’s frequent leading man Michael Shannon plays Roy, a determined father who, along with his old buddy Lucas (Joel Edgerton), have snatched Roy’s young son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) from a Texas cult headed by Sam Shepard. The cult believes the boy is a messiah, while the federal government views him as a dangerous weapon. We soon understand both groups’ reasoning: At inopportune moments, Alton’s eyes flash with white blinding light, disrupting power sources around him.

So, who’s right and what’s going on exactly? Nichols leaves those mysteries, and others, unanswered for much of Midnight Special’s running time. The film has been compared to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Starman, with a dash of E.T. thrown in as well, but unlike a lot of sci-fi movies, we’re not given a set of rules at the start to then serve as our guide into the narrative. Instead, Nichols constantly teases out new information—not just about Alton’s strange powers but also about Roy, Lucas, and others—that deepens our understanding of what we’re witnessing. Grounding the proceedings in realism, Nichols never gives his characters big speeches to explain what they’re doing and why: Every character in Midnight Special is smart, and so they simply go about pursuing their objectives, and part of the film’s pleasure is guessing and then sometimes being surprised by what will transpire.

On its simplest level, Midnight Special is a superb chase movie, with Roy, Lucas, and Alton careening through Texas, heading east to some unspecified rendezvous spot. (They often do this at night, for reasons we’ll eventually understand.) Trying to outrun an Amber Alert, they hope to stay a step ahead of the cult’s enforcers (one of whom is played by Bill Camp), while in the meantime a team led by Adam Driver’s nerdy, brilliant NSA operative Paul Sevier is working remotely to determine exactly where these fugitives are headed. Nichols has woven suspense into several of his previous movies—all of which take place in sleepy, vibrantly drawn communities in the Midwest or South—but never with the scope and intensity that he brings to Midnight Special. The film feels intimately drawn but also grandly designed, the crosscutting between the different groups of characters hinting at a significant showdown coming just down the road.

But the film’s great strength is that, although nestled comfortably in a couple genres, it keeps scurrying free of their strictures so that Nichols can focus on the emotional connective tissue that unites his central characters. Better yet, he doesn’t always make those connections explicit. When our runaways eventually hook up with Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), Alton’s mother and Roy’s wife, there’s no explanation given about the couple’s status or their individual backstories. Sarah’s long braided ponytail suggests she was once part of the cult, but even that is speculation, and frankly the absence of such details adds a rich texture of ambiguity and urgency to everything we see. Midnight Special’s principals are in such a rush to get Alton to his destination that there’s no time for needless character specifics.