10 Cloverfield Lane

At first I thought it was peculiar to come back to the Godzilla-like events of the 2008 monster flick Cloverfield, but then I realized that 10 Cloverfield Lane, the thriller from earlier this year, is not your average monster story. I will do my best to avoid spoilers in this review, because the less you know about the film's story going in, the better. Could I elaborate? It's best not to. Just keep in mind that the two films are sort of spiritual cousins in name only. Both are produced by J.J. Abrams, who, along with his director, Dan Trachtenberg, doesn't channel Speilberg so much as he channels Hitchcock.

To me, what connects these two films is not leviathans both real and imaginary, but panic. The very first moments of 10 Cloverfield Lane establish that. None of the opening moments are too clear, other than a young woman named Michelle (played exceptionally by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) leaving her lover quickly and dashing off on the road. She's in a car accident, and then we see her awake, chained up with an IV hooked to her, and barely clothed. It appears that her captor is a man named Howard, played by the consummate John Goodman. Fivethirtyeight, the data-driven news site, recently identified Goodman as America's greatest supporting actor. The author of that article, Walt Hickey, compares him to Phil Hartman, the "Glue" of Saturday Night Live, the man who kept sketches together despite rarely leading them. That's true for 10 Cloverfield Lane. He's clearly the supporting role to Winstead's lead, but he is essential to understanding the film's beginning, middle, and end. It is one of Goodman's most interesting roles and performances. He's terrifying, but he sprinkles in a few moments of light humor to remind us how funny he easily can be. At times he makes us feel sorry for Howard. Does he have a split personality? If this movie were released later in the year, there definitely would be talk of an Oscar nomination for him.

Howard and Michelle are not alone. They are joined by a third banana, a kind but slightly dimwitted man named Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), and all three of them, according to Howard and Emmett, are in a Cold War-era style bunker. Why? There was some kind of attack. A chemical kind. Maybe it was the Russians. Maybe it was terrorists. They're not sure. One thing they apparently are sure of is how unsafe it is to venture outdoors, or the chemicals will undoubtedly kill them. But Michelle shares the presumed skepticism most, if not all, of the viewers have: was there really an attack? Howard's menacing and malicious demeanor, in stark contrast to Howard's chatty (and overly nice) persona, only complicates her position. Is Howard telling the truth? There is a lot of subtle satire of the paranoid atmosphere of the Cold War, "duck and cover" days. "Crazy is building your ark after the flood has come!" Michelle argues (to Emmett, not Howard). According to Emmett, Howard, a military veteran who saw the attack with his own eyes, has a "black belt in conspiracy theory."

While no one could call 10 Cloverfield Lane predictable, like most movies associated with Abrams it really falls apart in the final moments, becoming dumber and dumber with each passing moment. With or without the bizarre final ten minutes, 10 Cloverfield Lane still wouldn't be a great film, but it's finale surely doesn't help. See it, and try to forget the ending.