Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is driving one night when she gets run off the road. She wakes up locked up and chained by burly, intense John Goodman who says it’s for her protection. Eventually, she is let out of her restraints to find that she’s in some kind of doomsday prepper shelter, and Goodman warns that she can’t go outside. Nothing outside is inhabitable anymore, he says the air is poisonous, after an ‘attack’ of some kind. Winstead is still highly suspicious and starts to look for a way out, as she also learns more about her harsh captor (or saviour?).

 

To be perfectly honest, I think this film works best the less you know about it. So bear that in mind, in case you want to back out of this review now. Spoilers will be duly forewarned, but still proceed at your own peril. A mixture of “Cloverfield” and the low-budget “Monsters”, this 2016 Dan Trachtenberg film manages to do right what those two films failed to do. For starters, for a film kinda sorta set in the same universe as “Cloverfield” it is shot by Jeff Cutter (“Gridiron Gang”, “Orphan”) in a much more stable and competent fashion than the shaky-cam nightmare that J.J. Abrams film was (Abrams serves as producer here). And unlike the overrated “Monsters”, this one manages to tell its story in a way that doesn’t seem like it should be more explicit and expansive in scope.

 

This has an interesting set-up somewhere in between “Saw” and “Room”, but the title obviously suggests an eventual twist of the unearthly kind. It also boasts terrific performances by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and especially John Goodman in one of his best-ever turns. The underrated Winstead is instantly good, but Goodman’s usual casting as a reliable and good-natured big lug here is blown away as he instead plays an intense, physically intimidating and unsettling man. He may be telling the truth, but he’s much more convincingly creepy to suggest that he might be a dangerous loon. I mean, he’s keeping people locked and chained up in a ‘Doomsday Prepper’ bomb shelter-type place, and ranting about an ‘attack’ for crying out loud. Thing is, good guy or not (and he’s quite clearly not a good guy), if he’s actually right…you kinda want this guy on your side. If he’s wrong and is just a crazy loon…good luck with that.

 

It’s very much a talky film, but if you want to do a film of this type on a low-budget, this right here is the way to do it. No shaky-cam “Cloverfield” shit, and it never once plays like a film that is basically compensating for its low budget by being talky and vague on the visuals. It’s not a great film, and a lot of people are gonna have issues with the finale. ***** SPOILER WARNING ***** Some will say it’s got one ginormous Mary Sue doing in mere seconds what no one else seems to have been able to do. I must admit that the finale plays out a little to simply for me, too but I understand that they didn’t want it to have an epic-length, either. So a little bit of compromise had to be made I suppose. ***** END SPOILER *****

 

For the most part, this is a pretty good directorial debut by Trachtenberg. It’s certainly better than “Cloverfield”, and Winstead needs to be a star already. She has ‘it’. All of it. A sort-of sequel to “Cloverfield”, the screenplay is by Josh Campbell (an assistant editor with his first major screenwriting credit), Damien Chazelle (writer-director of “Whiplash”), and Matthew Stuecken (producer of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”), from a story by Campbell and Stuecken.

 

Rating: B-