Film review: ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’

The much-anticipated ‘10 Cloverfield’ will make you jump... and squirm|

“10 Cloverfield Lane” is the latest horror installation based on America’s apparently insatiable appetite for films featuring women locked in cinderblock bunkers.

Following on tip toe from last year’s “Room,” this film gives us an aspiring fashion designer, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who wakes up in a basement after she’s been incapacitated by a mysterious car crash. She’s chained to the wall and it’s immediately clear that this is that queasy kind of drama where your main rooting interest is that the protagonist won’t be used as a sex slave.

Michelle’s captor – who calls himself her savior – is Howard (a door-sized John Goodman, first scary with a rough beard and then somehow more terrifying without it). From his unconfirmed testimony on current events, an alien chemical attack rendered the outside world uninhabitable. Howard is barely able to contain his glee that the tinfoil hat worst case scenario has come to pass and he’s settling into his enclosure for “one or two years.”

We get background on Howard from the man who helped him build and now joins him in the shelter, Emmett, a good-natured layabout played by John Gallagher Jr. (Emmett is very much like Gallagher Jr.’s character in “Short Term 12” – never quite as interesting as you’d wish him to be). Howard is retired Navy and quickly proves himself to be a bossy, put-a-coaster-under-that-beverage kind of guy. He’s full of terse statements to his roommates: “We can’t afford wasted flushes.”

Happily for all, he distilled a supply of his own vodka before the end times and, though humor is largely leached out of the film, Howard has some funny lines, such as, “I know I seem like a sensible guy…” And yet he’s spent tens of thousands of dollars on air filtration, water purifiers, and even aquarium supplies but somehow not a flatscreen television, which would’ve been perfect for binge-watching “Roseanne.”

It’s regrettable that Howard’s crackpot theories about things like space worms are never given enough time. Minutes are instead wasted on deadend backstories for Emmett and Michelle while their host has great rants at the ready for important topics like the merits of “Pretty in Pink” versus “Sixteen Candles.”

Such a situation can only stay tense for a certain period and credit is due director Dan Trachtenberg for ensuring that, when things go bad, they go very bad very quickly – a closeup of a character having a thought is often immediately followed by loud noises. Almost any detail from the plot would constitute the dreaded “spoiler,” but suffice it to say Michelle does not foresee a happily ever after underground (her bangs would no doubt suffer without professional attention for 24 months).

In the end, it all comes back to a question as old as humanity itself: would you rather go outside and face death by alien predation or sit inside watching low res John Hughes DVDs with a mansplaining John Goodman?

“10 Cloverfield Lane” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13. Running time 1:43. Visit cinemawest.com.

UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy:
  • This is a family newspaper, please use a kind and respectful tone.
  • No profanity, hate speech or personal attacks. No off-topic remarks.
  • No disinformation about current events.
  • We will remove any comments — or commenters — that do not follow this commenting policy.