Movie Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane

More Room than Doom, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a slow-burn thriller with different surprises in store than in 2008’s Cloverfield. No spoilers, we promise, but if you want to go in clean, continue with caution.

The cast and crew of 10 Cloverfield Lane didn’t realise they were working on a Cloverfield spin-off/ spiritual sequel until after production had wrapped and producer J.J. Abrams decided to badge its trailer with a familiar new title. (During production, it had been known as both The Cellar and Valencia.)

I mention this marketing sneak-attack first to get it out of the way, because linking 10 Cloverfield Lane with the 2008 monster movie it takes its name from will only unreasonably alter expectations (even if it does end up inflating box office grosses). Pardon the pun, but this is a different beast entirely.

Director Dan Trachtenberg’s newie doesn’t take place in the same universe as its namesake, or even on the same timeline. The cast is fresh; its “big bad” villain, more so. What it shares, Abrams argued to Rolling Stone, is a “vibe”, unwittingly quoting Australian classic The Castle in the process.

However, if you have no relationship to Matt Reeves’ actually-very-good found footage flick from ’08, you may be sucked in by this unexpected mystery box of a movie as the rest of us were by the original. And in that way, the Cloverfield connection will be complete. Like The Twilight Zone before it, maybe the Cloverfield brand name will become associated with disarmed audiences being totally blindsided.

This one begins with aspiring designer Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) ditching her fiancée and abandoning their apartment in a hurry. Driving off into the sunset, Michelle’s escape is derailed when her car is T-boned by another mysterious motorist.

Next we see Michelle, she’s waking up in an underground bunker, where she’s been chained to a wall by doomsday prepper Howard (John Goodman), who's assuring her it's for her own good. In the time that she was unconscious, Howard says, the world was struck either by a nuclear attack, terrorists or perhaps even aliens. All he knows for sure is that they – along with the broken-armed Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), who fought his way into the bunker – need to play happy family for a couple of years, while they wait for order to return above ground and the poisoned air to become breathable once more.

For a while, the trio pass the time with board games, puzzles and rationed pasta. It’s only when Michelle realises there’s another kind of monster down there in the cellar that panic really sets in. Might it be worth taking her chances on the surface, unknown devils be damned?

By that synopsis alone, you should spot the difference between Cloverfields. Where the original was a first-person amusement park ride, this is a slow-burn chamber piece; more Room than Doom.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its thrills. First-time feature filmmaker Trachtenberg, just like Abrams, is clearly an acolyte of Steven Spielberg, and his picture pays homage to much of Spielberg’s filmography, from Duel to Jaws to… other famous titles that I won’t name, to keep from spoiling 10 Cloverfield Lane’s nutso final act. (Cinematographer Jeff Cutter must similarly be a fan of the ‘Spielberg Face’, what with his fixation on awed expressions.)

The actors are uniformly impressive, with Goodman both charming and queasy-making as Michelle’s cryptic captor, and the elsewhere criminally-underutilised Winstead especially strong as the resourceful, perpetually-plotting heroine. They each keep interest from waning while Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken’s script (polished by Whiplash’s Damien Chazelle) not-always-successfully stretches its short-film concept to feature-length. Tension takes time to build, but attention is not easily won back.

10 Cloverfield Lane only just earns its protracted running time with a careful mixture of quiet human moments, clockwork-precise punctuations of occasional terror and engaging, allegiance-shifting performances. Its commentary on modern-day paranoia and fear of the other is a little undercut by the finale, but then, the priority here was always to make an audience squirm, not necessarily to meditate.

If the title won your attention, awesome. Now, try to forget it. Approach 10 Cloverfield Lane like the enigmatic little experiment it really is, and be pleasantly surprised.

3.5/5

In cinemas now. Rated M for sustained threat, violence and coarse language.