10 Cloverfield Lane: A Home at the End of the World

In 10 Cloverfield Lane’s opening scenes, Michele (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has just left her boyfriend and is driving through rural Louisiana when her car collides into another vehicle, leaving her unconscious. She awakens in a cinder block cell, her leg cuffed to the wall. A man named Howard (John Goodman) appears and updates her on the situation. The good news is that he happened upon Michele’s wreck and saved her life, and that he (allegedly) has no sinister intentions. The bad news is that an ambiguous “attack” has since occurred which has rendered the Earth’s atmosphere lethal. Only Howard’s bomb shelter has enabled them to survive, along with Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), a local who helped Howard build his doomsday hidey-hole.

Once healed, Michele is permitted free roam of the strangely cozy shelter, with the trio playing the part of a perverse post-apocalyptic family. Michele’s circumstances are almost perfect in their paralyzing cruelty. It’s impossible to verify Howard’s cataclysmic claims, and many aspects of his story don’t add up, although Emmett believes that something bad has occurred topside. Michele is effectively presented with an unworkable puzzle, but Howard’s increasingly menacing behavior demands that she solve it, and soon.

The behemoth in the room is the film’s title and producers, which imply a relationship to the 2008 found-footage creature feature Cloverfield. However, any connection between the two films is ultimately immaterial. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a terrifically conceived and executed thriller in its own right, akin to a top-tier Twilight Zone episode. Director Dan Trachtenberg handles the slow-boil tension and icy shocks with equal facility, assisted by a fearsome turn from Goodman in Barton Fink mode. Except for a few minutes of bloat in the film’s running time, 10 Cloverfield Lane makes for bracingly enthralling genre cinema, both down-to-earth and fantastical.

10 Cloverfield Lane opens in wide release on Friday, March 11.