Claustrophobic thriller with a puzzle-box plot
10 Cloverfield Lane
Cert 12A. 105 min
Dir: Dan Trachtenberg. Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr
Ayoung woman Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) drives through the empty countryside at night. She is upset and doing her best to ignore a mobile phone buzzing.
Moments earlier, she had been hurriedly packing a suitcase in an apartment but pointedly leaving behind a diamond ring. A news report crackles across the car radio about mysterious electrical surges causing power cuts nationwide. But she isn’t paying attention. Why would she? Her whole world is falling apart. This is the opening of 10 Cloverfield
Lane, the first feature from Dan Trachtenberg and a spiritual successor to Matt Reeves’s 2008 film Cloverfield, in which a band of self-admiring New York hipsters were trampled by an enormous 9/11 metaphor. Unlike an ordinary sequel, Trachtenberg’s film doesn’t pick up where Reeves’s left off. In fact, it probably doesn’t even take place in the same movie universe.
Instead, think of the title as an invitation from producer JJ Abrams, Hollywood’s master of the tease, to chew over the new film in light of the old one. Both are darkly enthralling, fantastical thrillers that use allegory like an explosive harpoon. And both borrow astutely from video games –
Cloverfield most obviously in its blood-pounding first-person perspective, and 10 Cloverfield Lane in the way clue-gathering and lateral thinking click open traps of its puzzle-box plot.
So when Michelle wakes in an empty concrete room with her leg chained to a pipe, the pleasure of the scene comes in working out what she can do to escape. All of 10 Cloverfield
Lane is a game about finding out what is hidden behind the next door. It’s not until the final 15 minutes that we find out if we have been watching a science-fiction or a horror movie.
Michelle’s host is Howard (John Goodman), a quick-tempered survivalist with a 10-year stockpile of tinned food and an appetite for Armageddon. The room is part of Howard’s underground shelter, where he says he dragged Michelle when disaster struck. “There’s been an attack,” he tells her. “A big one.” The details are unclear but the air outside is unbreathable and the poison will take at least a year to dissipate. Until then, they are stuck downstairs together. Michelle, Howard, and Emmet (John Gallagher Jr), a baseball-capped, dim-grinning fellow survivor.
Most of the film takes place in this Sartrean hell, which Trachtenberg evokes with efficiency.
The script – by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle – zips between claustrophobic tension and nervous laughs with hoverfly agility. Michelle, Howard and Emmett are not natural flatmates, and we are drip-fed facts about Howard’s past, which throw doubt on his original story.
What Michelle sees through the hatch suggests Howard is broadly telling the truth. But he’s also an oldschool, blustering patriarch. Limiting other people’s worlds is what he does.
Michelle’s gradual realisation that she has to face and survive what’s outside on her own terms is the heart of the film, and Winstead plays that transformation with a subtlety and slyness that’s hugely satisfying.
The opening of the bunker door leads to an unnerving final act, which perhaps depends on one coincidence too many but still ties things up with a be-tentacled, Lovecraftian flourish.
Part of the lasting intrigue of the original Cloverfield was that we never found out exactly what its title stood for. But if the answer turns out to be a smart and suspenseful modern-day Twilight Zone franchise, it would be the most satisfying twist imaginable.