Film Review

10 Cloverfield Lane Review

Published

10 years ago

March 19, 2016

Admin

Unlucky for Some

♦ Tripwire sent editor-in-chief Joel Meadows complete with gas mask and leg chain to review Dan Trachtenberg’s follow-up to Cloverfield, 10 Cloverfield Lane Major Spoiler warning: Do Not Read If You Haven’t Seen The Film

10 Cloverfield Lane

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Stars: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Eight years is a virtual lifetime in Hollywood. Back in 2008, when Cloverfield was released, JJ Abrams was just the director of a few moderately successful movies. It was before Star Trek and most significantly, it was before Star Wars: The Force Awakens. So we fast-forward almost a decade later and his star has risen in a surprising fashion. Just like its progenitor, 10 Cloverfield Lane is only produced by Abrams but his fingerprints are all over the script and the plot. Michelle, (Mary Elizabeth Winstead from Scott Pilgrim), decides to leave her old life behind in one of the US’s bigger cities so she packs everything up into her car and does a runner. Unfortunately for her, she has a car accident on the road in the south and wakes up with a drip and chained to the wall of an unknown house. She doesn’t remember how she got there but she is soon introduced to the man who seemingly saved her life, the mysterious Howard (John Goodman). Howard claims that the world has changed and a terrible disaster has befallen it since she had her car accident, so he is keeping her locked away in the basement of his house for her own good. But is Howard crazy or is there more to his story than just the ravings of a bitter old man?

10 Cloverfield Lane is a very effective psychological thriller with Goodman on top form as the demented Howard. A little bit like Misery for the 21st century, Trachtenberg and his cinematographer Jeff Cutter discombobulate the audience almost from the start, creating this claustrophobic world with only three main players (Howard, Michelle and fellow ‘inmate’ Emmett (John Gallagher Jr). It gives it an almost theatrical feel and lends to the sense of insularity and hopelessness. Goodman is exceptional as he manages to make Howard both a dangerous psychopath and a sympathetic figure, cast from the same mold as Annie Wilkes from Misery, and if he doesn’t get some sort of Oscar nod for next year, there is no justice in this world. Winstead isn’t bad, showing a little bit of range and Gallagher Jr is an effective foil for her.

The end is a little bit disappointing but the journey is an interesting one and 10 Cloverfield Lane is a far more intriguing and thought-provoking film than its predecessor. It does set things up for other adventures in the same world so we shall see if they can be as inventive with a third Coverfield as they were with the second.