10 Cloverfield Lane: An Exercise in Doubt

Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane raises an intriguing dilemma. Is knowing the truth or not scarier? It mostly does a good job of entertaining this question. This movie came out of nowhere, somehow remaining a well-kept secret until a trailer for what is essentially a distant cousin of Cloverfield was released in January of 2016, and people on the internet started buzzing. Revisiting the movie, I have to say that it's an extremely well-written apocalyptic escape room thriller that, for some reason, feels the need to be a Cloverfield movie when it would have been better off being its own thing. In short, this movie is about a woman named Michelle and a man named Emmett trapped inside a survivalist bunker owned by Howard, a Navy veteran claiming that some apocalyptic scenario has unfolded outside. Except we don't know if Howard is even telling the truth. It's not a complicated premise, but my goodness, is it effective.

The production design of this movie is fantastic, and for some reason, at its very best for the two or so minutes we see Michelle's bedroom. Every decoration and trinket in her room is designed to tell us everything we need to know about her without saying anything at all. I felt like I already knew her without even hearing her voice. This movie's recipe for success is to make itself as compact as possible, and what better way than to throw three strangers who don't trust each other in a bunker together? Howard isn't entirely trustworthy, but given what we know about the Cloverfield franchise, we know he's telling the truth on some level. We just don't know how far his honesty extends, and this sentiment slowly fabricates the most valuable asset this movie possesses - doubt. This doubt seeps into every corner of 10 Cloverfield Lane until you'll be questioning even the little things.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I like movies with small, contained stories. They make conflict unavoidable, keep the writing tight, and help prevent long and pointless subplots from gaining traction. The small cast of 10 Cloverfield Lane does it a lot of favors. The more I learned about Michelle, Emmett, and Howard, the more I wanted to learn about them. They're interesting characters, not necessarily because they're outlandish or original, but rather because this movie takes such an interest in the nuances of relatively ordinary, everyday people.

Anyone who watches movies knows that things will eventually turn sour here. However, the ways in which this movie twists, turns, and eventually goes bad are still shocking nonetheless. In many ways, I wondered if 10 Cloverfield Lane was bluffing with its unspoken but ever-present air of gloom and doom. Spoiler alert - it's not. Its grasp of setup and payoff is magnificent, and every skill Michelle learns while in the bunker with Howard and Emmett eventually gets used on some level when things eventually do hit the fan.

It's not a perfect movie, and the biggest flaw of 10 Cloverfield Lane has to be that it feels the need to be a Cloverfield movie. I did some research and discovered that a corroding hunch of mine was correct - 10 Cloverfield Lane had indeed been turned into a Cloverfield movie after it had been conceived and written as a standalone thriller. The last ten minutes or so don't gel with the rest of the story and would have been better off being cut altogether and the movie marketed as an original story. It could have been ten minutes shorter and virtually perfect, not to detract from what it accomplished.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a taut, claustrophobic thriller that should not have felt the need to shoehorn its way into the Cloverfield universe. Why should it need to when it works extraordinarily well as its own contained story? It worked so well up until the last ten minutes that I genuinely found myself feeling robbed by the climax, and I only use as strong a term as that one because I was so madly in love with every story beat that came before. Nevertheless, the performances here are incredibly strong and three-dimensional all across the board - courtesy of a tiny but talented cast - and at every moment of this movie, I felt as though the walls of Howard's bunker were closing in, threatening to crush everyone inside. The whole time, you'll be wondering if Howard is lying and considering the implications if he is. If you ask me, I think the only possibility more terrifying is if Howard is actually telling the truth.

10 Cloverfield Lane - 9/10

Revelation 6:15-17