10 Cloverfield Lane

This is not the movie you think it is.

A self-proclaimed “blood relative” to the 2008 found footage monster mash original, 10 Cloverfield Lane works best when you head into the theater armed with the least amount of knowledge regarding this film as possible, so I’m gonna keep this review as super vague and spoiler free as I can. Here’s the basic premise in fifteen words or less: three people are stuck in a bunker and all is not what it seems. I’d love to elaborate, but like I said, the less you know the more you’ll enjoy.

First things first: this is a bold direction to take a “sequel”. I’ve very rarely seen a movie like this take the approach it’s taken towards its original subject matter, but then again, when has Bad Robot or JJ Abrams ever played fair when it comes to the projects they’ve worked on? Anyway, when the Bad Robot logo is stamped at the beginning of a movie, you know you’re either in for a devilishly interesting and unusual movie, or something with a whole lot of promise that ends up going nowhere. Thankfully, 10 Cloverfield Lane is the former.

With a cast that only consists of three main characters, the filmmakers had to nail the actors for this film perfectly to even stand a chance of the story working the way it was intended, and good news everyone, each actor pulls their fair share of the weight incredibly. John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr. are great in the roles thrust on them, each actor balancing between some genuine emotions while realistically reacting to the various pressure cooker situations they find themselves in. First time director Dan Trachtenberg really pulls some good stuff out of his actors, a few scenes between Goodman and Winstead standing out as some of the most riveting stuff I’ve seen in a genre flick in a while.

In the hands of Trachtenberg, this film is a tense, unreliable thriller that’ll have you guessing what will happen next while trying to figure out how it all pieces together. Trachtenberg has an eye for what looks good on camera and uses that skill to really make the movie pop cinematically in a way that I wasn’t expecting. You always have to hand it to directors who shoot their movies in a confined space with barely more than four walls and a few small rooms to shoot around, and Trachtenberg doesn’t disappoint. Other than that, I’d have to say that while it did its job for the most part, the score of the film was a little over the top and intense at moments for no real reason. When it worked, it worked great, when it didn’t, I was wondering why everything was so hyped for no apparent reason, but either way it got the job done.

Being a pseudo-sequel to Cloverfield, I spent more than half the film wondering when the monster element from the first movie would rear its ugly head and really shake things up. And then I waited…and waited some more…and then I forgot about it only for those nagging thoughts to come back ten minutes later so I could wait for it again. My point is, the film would have been perfectly fine without the Cloverfield tag, but since it’s right there in the title for everyone to see, it became that much harder to stop expecting things and just go with it.

When what I wanted finally ended up happening later on in the movie, I was so caught up in what I imagined would happen that I failed to appreciate what actually did end up happening. I felt weird about it all, like the film jumped the shark and went off into a bizarre sci-fi realm where, after all I’ve seen and expected, I didn’t necessarily want to go. In retrospect, the ending was actually pretty cool, but the forced or rather implicated ties to the original, led to an underwhelming reaction even though I was being overwhelmed with what was happening onscreen.

Now don’t get me wrong, using this film as a sort of Cloverfield universe tie-in isn’t a bad idea, it’s just hard to concentrate on the story at hand while my mind was working overtime trying to align everything up. Obviously this nitpick is more on me as a viewer than on the film itself, but you can’t expect someone to not try and draw those comparisons with Cloverfield in the title, especially if they’ve seen and enjoyed the original. This is a great film without the Cloverfield implications, I’m just more mad at myself for not being able to see past that and getting hung up on what the connections might be, if any.

Outside of this rather big gripe, the only other places this film struggled were with its pacing. More than once I was waiting (a running theme while watching this film apparently) for more to happen onscreen, only to be left with a handful of scenes that just felt like extra fluff. These parts of the film, while not necessarily slow since almost all lulls in action or tension were made up by some excellent character work, definitely hurt the momentum of the story a bit. It’s hard to judge when the entire point of the movie is to mislead and intrigue in a deliberately slow and methodical way, but I still feel like some spots needed a bit more of a pick-me-up.

10 Cloverfield Lane is an odd achievement in filmmaking that bucks all trends or ideas one would normally associate with a sequel. It’s a tense, scary, and unique character driven mystery with more twists and turns than a M. Night Shyamalan movie. These are the types of “sequels” that Hollywood needs to be making, and I look forward to another entry in this Cloverfield universe whenever they get around to sneaking another one into production.