Warning: This article contains spoilers for 10 Cloverfield LaneWhen the JJ Abrams-produced Cloverfield was announced in 2007, it became somewhat of a phenomenon before the movie even hit theaters. Message boards were flooded with online sleuths digging for clues in the enigmatic trailers, and the found-footage monster movie sparked an extensive augmented reality game for fans to dig through every bit of lore. The film was a hit and was followed up by a spiritual sequel in 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, directed by Matt Reeves. But despite both being produced by Abrams and sharing the Cloverfield moniker, the sequel is a huge departure from the first film, perhaps for the better.
While Cloverfield was a bombastic sci-fi spectacle that sprawled all across New York City, its sequel is a tense, contained story that takes place almost entirely in a claustrophobic underground bunker. Though the original had a large cast consisting of hundreds of extras playing soldiers and panicking New Yorkers, Cloverfield Lane follows just three people for almost its entire runtime.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Michelle, a fashion designer who wakes up in the bunker after a car accident. John Gallagher Jr. plays Emmet, a construction worker who helped build the bunker. And John Goodman plays the foreboding owner of the bunker, Howard. There is a fourth character, an unnamed woman who comes and goes in just one scene, so the movie rests almost entirely on the shoulders of its three leads.
And all three excel in crafting a taut, paranoid nail-biter that only loses its effectiveness when the doors open in the third act and the bunker becomes an afterthought.
But there’s one performance in particular that stands out.
With such a limited cast, all three main actors needed to bring their best, and none of them disappointed. Elizabeth Winstead plays Michelle as a perfect blend of vulnerability and competence. Gallagher Jr.’s Emmet is convincingly aloof and browbeaten. But it’s Goodman as Harold that steals the show.
Throughout the movie, it’s unclear if he’s a savior or a captor. He claims there’s an alien invasion underway and that the only safe place for the others is with him. But it’s unclear for both the audience members and the other characters whether he’s a paranoid conspiracy theorist or a kidnapper trying to replace his estranged daughter. Or possibly both.
Goodman’s portrayal of someone who can go from awkwardly affable to violently angry is terrifying and echoes throughout the bunker. Howard can go from dancing at the jukebox one second to slamming his hands on the dinner table and screaming at his guests the next.
Goodman plays the role with aplomb, presenting the character as someone who might be even more of a threat than any alleged alien attacks.
After Howard kills Emmet, Michelle finally escapes the bunker, and the movie undergoes a significant tonal shift. Gone are the cluttered, cramped confines of the first two acts as Michelle finds herself in an open field.
And it turns out Howard was right. There was an alien invasion going on, after all. Now Michelle has to face this new threat in such a way that it feels divorced from the rest of the movie.
It culminates with Michelle landing a perfect shot with a Molotov cocktail while she’s mid-abduction. It feels like a sequence out of a big-budget Summer blockbuster, something the movie had decidedly not been up to its final minutes.
10 Cloverfield Lane was adapted from an unrelated, original script called The Cellar, so it’s possible the end sequence could have been a late addition to align the movie with the larger Cloverfield universe, but it feels out of place when the movie had been building itself as a tense thriller and not an action romp.
10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie that thrives when it embraces the suffocating tension of its first two acts. The space is so restrictive that even the tiniest indiscretion could easily lead to violence. While the ending takes an abrupt turn, ***10 Cloverfield Lane ***remains a harrowing watch, even if only for John Goodman’s performance.
10 Cloverfield Lane ](/db/movie/10-cloverfield-lane/)
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Dan Trachtenberg
Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, Damien Chazelle