[Major 10 Cloverfield Lane plot spoilers below]
10 Cloverfield Lane is what would happen if Brie Larson’s Room suddenly turned into Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.
10 Cloverfield Lane feels like Tyler Turden invaded the projection booth and replaced the final reel with the ending from a completely different movie (if movies were still projected as individual reels, of course).
10 Cloverfield Lane is an Oscar-caliber thriller that quite suddenly turns into a summer blockbuster.
10 Cloverfield Lane is like…
OK, we get it! 10 Coverfield Lane has a jarring ending, but does it still kind of work as a whole? Yes, but it’s really a shame about that ending.
10 Cloverfield Lane introduces us to Michelle (Mary-Elizabeth Winstead) as she’s plunging headlong into the night. Director Drew Tractenberg’s overhead camera peers down on her car ala Psycho and The Shining and Bear McCreary’s brassy score bludgeons us over the head to the point of annoyance. Her spurned spouse (voiced by Bradley Cooper!) calls and begs for her return, but before Michelle can muster a response she’s driven off the road in a completely disorienting crash sequence.
As we watch Michelle’s crash as if we were right next to her in the car, Saul Bass-esque opening credits formally welcome us to the movie. What ensues is around 85% psychological thriller and 15% sci-fi craziness.
Michelle wakes up handcuffed to a bed in a locked room of an underground bunker, an IV drip attached to her arm and medical brace on her knee. There are strange noises coming from above her and outsider her door, and her burly captor Howard (John Goodman) is instantly alarming.
It’s a nightmarish scenario, clearly starting things off on the wrong foot for Michelle and Howard. He says an apocalyptic event perpetrated by the Russians, North Koreans or possibly even extraterrestrials poisoned the air above ground, and they have to stay underground for at least year while waiting for the air to become breathable again. He reveals his bunker has a fully operational kitchen, entertainment area with a TV and a bathroom. She meets the third party of their trio, Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), an affable, if somewhat dimwitted blue collar kind of guy who helped Howard build the bunker.
However, why should Michelle trust anything Howard says? Who is Emmett, really, and is the sling holding up his right arm truly due to an innocent accident like he says?
It’s kind of like a far scarier version of Kimmy Schmidt’s time in the bunker just with less Hulkamania
The joy comes from getting to know the characters and watching the mystery unfold, especially since Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle’s script continually plays with genre expectations. Michelle and Emmett bond as two people with deep regrets and dreams deferred while Howard creepily infantilizes Michelle as a substitute for his presumed dead daughter. Each time Michelle gets what appears to be a concrete answer to one of her questions a new mystery pops up, slowly revealing that even if Howard is right about doomsday that doesn’t make him any less terrifying.
This scenario is expertly constructed by the writers and perfectly executed by the director and three performers, with special praise reserved for Goodman.
The great pleasure of watching 10 Cloverfield Lane comes mainly from watching John Goodman’s masterfully weird performance, as a childlike control freak who may or may not have been right to prepare for an apocalypse. Goodman’s usual affability is almost completely subsumed inside a set of twitchy mannerisms, and he manages to keep you completely spellbound by his mercurial behavior—without ever overplaying it.
Howard’s early outbursts of anger and violence make us rightfully fearful of him, and that’s what the movie wants. It wants us to be on constant alarm for this powder keg to go off so that in certain scenes (e.g., when the three sit down to play Password) where that doesn’t happen we laugh at our own defied expectations.
Of course, Howard does eventually go over to the deep end at which point 10 Cloverfield Lane turns into a bit of a slasher movie with Howard the disfigured killer (thanks to a vat of acid) and Michelle the final girl, staging her great escape with a makeshift hazmat suit tied to her ankle as she crawls through the airducts. His booming voice and bowie knife are ever at her heels (or right next to her head), but her perseverance wins the day, finally exiting the bunker and facing daylight once again.
Michelle went into that bunker a woman who’d been abused by her father as a child and grew up always running away from her and other people’s problems, a story she told Emmett while fighting back tears. Then the moment Howard removed her protector Emmett from the equation in the bunker she ran and braved potential toxic gas rather than withstand a further minute of Howard’s emotional or physical abuse.
The answer is that you don’t. Instead, you slap an alien invasion sequence straight out of War of the Words on the end, hoping the resulting tonal dissonance will work in your favor. This is likely the scripted ending this story had back when it was called The Cellar and then Valencia, before it turned into a spiritual Cloverfield sequel. However, after such an intense chamber drama the inclusion of aliens who attempt to swallow Michelle whole feels tacked on from another franchise and genre. It’s similar to how several of the direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels began their lives as unrelated scripts which couldn’t get produced until Miramax decided to add Pinhead and the Cenobites to the story through rewrites.
To be fair, the ending presents entertaining action scenes and ultimately completes Michelle’s arc as someone who runs from those in need to someone who drives headlong toward danger because it will mean potentially helping people. Plus, if not aliens then what else could have been the explanation for what put them in that bunker? Cloverfield is in the title, after all.
Still, there’s a far more interesting version of this movie where after Michelle emerges from the bunker she doesn’t look up to see human-harvesting alien space ships unleashing toxic gas and isn’t attacked by a CGI monster with a giant eye for a face. That’s infinitely less interesting to me than the human monster she faced in that bunker.
10 Cloverfield Lane would be a more effecive movie if not for that ending, but it is still an expertly made movie nonetheless. It announces Tractenberg as a director to watch and delivers Goodman a late-career highlight.
What did you think of 10 Cloverfield Lane and its ending?