Eight years ago a JJ Abrams-produced, Matt Reeves-directed found footage film about a giant monster rampaging through a city called Cloverfield was released. It was pretty successful. That was the end of the story, until a couple months ago when a trailer for a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane got released out of nowhere. What is this new movie? Is it a sequel to Cloverfield? If so, why didn’t anybody know about its existence until it was already filmed and ready for release? Now that it’s out, we finally have some answers. 10 Cloverfield Lane is an exciting new post-apocalyptic thriller from veteran producer JJ Abrams and first time feature director Dan Trachtenberg. It doesn’t have anything to do with Cloverfield, other than maybe the inclusion of an Easter egg or two for the eagle-eyed to point out, but it does seem to be the beginning of a franchise where Abrams will use the word “Cloverfield” to market mysterious new genre projects with sci-fi conceits. Think, like, The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits.
The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, a woman who we first meet skipping town after having a big fight with her boyfriend, and whose story we follow after she’s run off the road in the middle of the night and then wakes up injured and chained to a wall in some kind of underground bunker. The guy who built the bunker and did the chaining is Howard (John Goodman), and according to him some sort of catastrophic attack took place in the world while Michelle was out, leaving the air toxic and pretty much everyone else dead. Howard is quick to anger, and comes with a real creep vibe, so it would be easy to dismiss his story, except for the fact that there’s also a nice young chap named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) in the bunker, and he says that not only were the attacks real, but he had to fight his way into the bunker at the last minute, right before the whole world went toxic, and Howard wasn’t exactly too happy about it. Who to believe? What to believe? How long are these three going to have to stay down in this bunker? And what’s going to happen to them while they’re in close-quarters confinement? 10 Cloverfield Lane is the sort of movie that raises a whole mess of questions.
The reason it’s worth watching is that it teases out those questions at the appropriate pace to milk the maximum amount of tension out of them, but not to let the mysteries overstay their welcome to the point of frustration. This is one of the rare mystery-focused thrillers that actually has satisfying pay-offs for all of the questions that it raises, as well. The film gets off to a quick start by immediately dropping you into uncertainty, and it never really lets you get your bearings after that. Every time you think you’ve figured out the situation, either outside the bunker or inside, a new twist is thrown your way that makes you question everything all over again. Then, just as you start to think that maybe the film is starting to drag things out a little too long, something crazy happens and you realize that you’re not still in the second act like you assumed, you’re actually pretty deep into the third. 10 Cloverfield Lane is able to create a series of satisfyingly jarring moments, but none more satisfying than its last fifteen minutes or so. When this film finally opens up its mystery box and lets you in on all of its secrets, things break loose so completely that it feels like this formerly small and intimate movie has lost its mind completely. But in a good way.
Up until that crazy ending, the bulk of 10 Cloverfield Lane really is just three characters sitting around in a single interior location while having tense conversations though, so the acting needed to be really good in order for the film not to fail. Well, it is, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the three actors who were cast. They’re one of the project’s biggest strengths. Gallagher first caught my attention with his role in Short Term 12, where he displayed a natural warmth and earnestness that serves his character here well. We have to believe the Emmett character for the whole setup not to feel like an obvious con, and Gallagher accomplishes that. Goodman is amazing in everything, always, but this film in particular has provided him with a character that plays right to his strengths. He’s got an uncanny ability to switch from jovial to intimidating at the drop of a hat, and 10 Cloverfield Lane puts that to use better than anything has since Barton Fink. Goodman is insanely watchable in this role, and in many ways he makes the movie.
Winstead’s protagonist is the only place where the film falters a bit. It’s not that she’s bad in the role—she sells fear when her character is being antagonized, she sells competence when her character is being resourceful, she sells being conflicted when she’s faced with impossible decisions—it’s just that the character she’s playing is way too thin as it appears on the page. Other than the fact that she’s had enough of her boyfriend and she wants to be a clothing designer, we never really learn anything about her as a person. Even worse, the one scene in the film that does attempt to give her some kind of backstory is clunky, full of tell-don’t-show expository dialogue, and is really the only major misstep of the entire movie. If 10 Cloverfield Lane was able to find a way to better develop the Michelle character in an organic way—to make us care about her more because we better understand who she is and why she reacts to certain situations the way she does—then it could have been truly engaging and memorable. People would be talking about it as being the second coming of Hitchcock rather than talking about it as just being the generally strong genre film that it is.
Unless you’re a great big bummer, a generally strong genre film is nothing to complain about though. 10 Cloverfield Lane looks great, it’s tense throughout, its mysteries are engaging, and its performances are strong, which makes it an easy recommendation and a tantalizing tease of what Trachtenberg might be able to accomplish going forward. They stuck the name of a successful film from the past onto this one for marketing purposes, but one has to imagine that his success here is going to lead to him being handed the reigns of an actual big money franchise film sooner rather than later. What would a Dan Trachtenberg-directed superhero movie or Star Wars movie look like? Probably not too different from how the super hero movies and Star Wars movies we get now look, but with the care he directed this one with and the understanding of genre he displayed, you know that they’d at least be good. Then, after he makes a few of those, after he makes the studios a pile of money and gets a little bit more freedom to do what he wants, that’s when things could get truly interesting.
