10 Cloverfield Lane

For a majority of its running time, 10 Cloverfield Lane is one of the more effective psychological thrillers to come out in a long time.  A lot of its success comes from its mysterious tone, in which we're never quite sure what to believe or what the truth really is.  It's when those answers finally start to come in the third act that the movie fumbles quite a bit.  Well, the third act still might have worked, just not in the way it's presented here, which is far too rushed and not very satisfying.  Still, this does little to take away from the fact that everything that comes before the final fifteen minutes is excellent in just about every way.

The setup could almost serve as a masterclass of keeping the audience invested with as little information as possible.  A young woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is seen leaving her home, and leaving her engagement ring on the table.  As she drives, her boyfriend (whose voice is provided by Bradley Cooper) calls her on her cell phone.  There's talk of a fight of some kind, and that he's sorry.  Just then, Michelle's car is struck by something (we don't see what it is yet), and her car spins out and goes off the road.  When she comes to, she finds herself in some kind of underground bunker room.  She's been treated for injuries from the accident, and is hooked up to an IV machine.  She's also chained to the wall.  She is soon introduced to her captor and/or possible savior.  He introduces himself as Howard (John Goodman), and he informs her that he has brought her down to this underground room for her own good.  Something terrible has happened up above on the surface, an attack of some kind.  We don't truly know what happened for most of the film, but there is talk of possibly Russians or North Korea being behind it all.  All Howard will say is that the world has become toxic and contaminated after a mass attack wiped out most of humanity, and that he saved her when he found her in her wrecked vehicle on the side of the road while he was headed to his doomsday bunker.

The only other occupant in the underground room is a handyman who used to work for Howard named Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.).  He backs up Howard's story that something apocalyptic is going on up on the surface, but his arm is in a cast, which hints that perhaps Howard has injured him.  However, this is a movie that's designed to lead us in multiple directions.  Did something really happen up there?  Is Howard truly who he says he is?  There are hints throughout the film that seem to suggest something more sinister is at work here.  We're constantly left guessing if Howard is telling the truth.  Did he rescue Michelle as a good Samaritan, or did he kidnap her?  Why doesn't certain information he tells her about his past match up with some of the things she finds around the bunker?  The screenplay is designed to misdirect us, and leave us wondering at just about every angle, and this is what makes the film such an effective thriller.

If there is a single performance to be singled out here, it is Goodman.  He makes Howard into such a believably complex character.  He can be charming, threatening, scary, and sometimes almost dangerous.  We can never quite get a real hold on the character, and that's the whole point.  Howard is supposed to be someone we can't put our finger on.  Is he helping these people, or holding them prisoner?  There's evidence enough to support both theories, and the movie takes on an almost Hitchcock-like vibe with having us figure out the true motives of the character.  It is a credit to Goodman that he plays the role with almost a straight poker face, so that we cannot read his true intentions.  As an actor, he can be one of the most likable personalities in the movies today, but he's also equally good in darker and more terrifying roles.  This performance shows off both of these strengths.  He can be weird and offputting with his behavior one minute, and the next truly convince us that he is only trying to keep this young woman safe from whatever is going on up above.

10 Cloverfield Lane is built almost entirely around red herrings and misdirection, and in the wrong hands, this could have been deadly for the film.  There's nothing more annoying than a movie that thinks it's smarter than its own audience, and is constantly throwing the rug out from under us.  But here, we don't feel like we're being jerked around.  The movie is playing with the audience, feeding us information a little at a time.  Is it trustworthy information?  That's for us to make up our own minds on.  In fact, the movie is so good at creating an atmosphere of suspense and wondering what is really going on that perhaps any answer would have been a disappointment on some level.  But the answer we do get, while not entirely unexpected if you saw the original Cloverfield movie, seems a little undercooked.  Here is a movie that, for most of its running time, has been slow and deliberate in the way it has played with us.  And then, during the third act, it looks like its racing to get the answers out to us, and rushes everything by in a fairly unsatisfying matter.  We want the movie to go back to playing with us.  We want to go back to not knowing what's really going on.

Still, this is only the last few minutes of the movie.  What comes before is so expertly put together and performed and tense that it would be insane of me not to recommend this.  10 Cloverfield Lane is 90% of a great movie, and 10% of a let down.  That counts as a recommendation.  The stuff that works is so great, you do wish that the movie could have held onto it all the way through.  Still, when you get right down to it, this is an incredibly intense and effective movie for almost all the way through, and it does work brilliantly when it is working.

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