ABCs of Horror 3: “#” Is for 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

Being dropped straight into the action, or awakening in strange and unknown territory, is a horror genre staple both for its disorienting effect and the potential for mysterious revelation it affords for the audience. Consider the closely related openings of a film like 28 Days Later or TV’s The Walking Dead, which both involve a man waking up in a hospital to find that he apparently slept right through the apocalypse, now awake and ambulatory in a world that has inexplicably gone to hell, without any idea of how things got that way, unequipped with the most basic knowledge necessary for survival. Now imagine you take that scenario and add in an imprisonment angle–a woman who wakes up being told that the world has ended by her captor-caretaker, but never actually witnessed it with her own eyes. How much proof would you really need, in order to accept that as gospel? And what’s the more desirable outcome: That the rest of the world has been ravaged, or that you now find yourself powerless in the hands of a delusional psychopath?

Or, you know, why not both? That’s the the pitch of Dan Trachtenberg’s tense 2016 directorial debut 10 Cloverfield Lane, a sterling psychological thriller that was crammed, somewhat awkwardly, into fitting the rough outline of an emerging J.J. Abrams Cloverfield franchise/extended mythos in order to see the light of day. Conceived as a thriller that would have been called The Cellar if not for the connection with Abrams’ 2008 found footage monster movie, the film thrives on standout performances from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and especially John Goodman as the two conduct a delicate dance of trust, suspicion and paranoia. It benefits greatly from the seesaw of conflicting information presented in its screenplay from Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle (for the rewrites), which repeatedly asks the audience to reframe their perception of its characters, heightening the rising and falling waves of suspense.

Winstead plays Michelle, a young woman on the run who has ditched her fiancé after an argument and set her sights on the open horizon. That is, until she’s run off the road in a suspicious traffic collision, awakening in the makeshift (but technically quite impressive and well-engineered) underground bunker of Howard (Goodman), a former Navy sailor whose obsessive and conspiratorial nature led him to plan for years for the end of the world, in whatever form that might take. And as he informs Michelle, that end is apparently now here: Some kind of unexplained “attack” has supposedly crippled the country’s government overnight and made the very air outside toxic to breathe. Howard insists that Michelle would be dead, if he hadn’t made the split-second decision to drag her unconscious form down into the “safety” of his below-ground fortress of solitude, where they can now expect to ride out the apocalypse for … months? Years? Regardless, without a wifi connection, cellular service or the keys to the reinforced door protecting them from the surface, Michelle has little choice but to at least humor Howard’s insistence that he is serving as her savior, rather than her jailer.

And as Michelle quickly comes to find, it’s not as if there aren’t some indications that Howard may be telling the truth, at least as he sees it. The bunker’s only other occupant, Howard’s construction assistant Emmett, (John Gallagher Jr.) wasn’t abducted but instead tried to force his way into the bunker when the first signs of the “attack” began, remembering Howard’s warnings. If anything, Emmett feels thankful and appreciative for the older man taking pity on him and allowing him refuge and a portion of his carefully stocked resources. His presence gives 10 Cloverfield Lane and its protagonist a more comforting character to fall back on.

Still, even if Howard’s beliefs may be rooted in some form of reality, that doesn’t make his demeanor and behavior any less troubling. He speaks frequently of an absent daughter without explaining what happened to her, and demands exaggerated gratefulness and polite affability of his new roommates, seemingly attempting to forge an awkwardly constructed family unit dynamic over charged, tense interactions at the dinner table. Goodman is sensational here, leaning into the sympathetic nature and root loneliness of Howard, but also his delusion, compulsion and social awkwardness, communicated physically with the suggestion of nearly irresistible bodily stress compulsions, like flexing and squeezing his hands. There’s a barely repressed, volcanic rage that seems to be forever bubbling up in Howard despite his own attempts at bland pleasantries, a bitter entitlement presumably born out of a long series of past relationship disappointments. He expects his new charges to be quietly calm, emotionless and subservient to their patriarchal figure, like he’s channeling the energy of a Christian doomsday cult leader. And he especially tends to infantilize Michelle, referring to the 30-something as a “girl,” “child” or “princess” rather than a “woman.” He clearly sees her less as an adult individual, and more as a fill-in for his own lost daughter … or something worse. But does that truly make him “dangerous,” or just merely awkward?

10 Cloverfield Lane’s strength lies in its ability to keep you guessing–each time you start forming a concrete opinion of whether or not Howard is full of shit, the film upends your footing once again. And it benefits as well from Winstead’s determined, realistically resourceful performance as an intelligent woman who understands she needs to tread carefully to engineer any real chance at escape … particularly into a world that may be just as inhospitable above ground. The film remains to date one of the few opportunities that Winstead has really had as a true “star vehicle” of this sort in wide release in theaters, rather than as a member of an ensemble. She’s an actress who has too often been left behind, as Tarantino did quite literally in Death Proof, a film where she’s not even present for its third act. In 10 Cloverfield Lane she finally got to carry a narrative through the finish line, in what probably should have been a more genuinely star-making turn.

With that said, it’s that conclusion where Trachtenberg’s film arguably becomes a bit too ultimately bound to the franchise association that ultimately gave it the leeway it presumably needed in order to be produced. It’s not that there’s something inherently wrong with the twist nature of the ending, either–you can’t watch this film and not expect for there to be a final twist/reveal in the nature of the world above that Howard has been hiding from Michelle and Emmett. That a twist exists can be safely assumed. Where some viewers will feel 10 Cloverfield Lane oversteps is in how fully it chooses to flesh out this new reality for Michelle when she finally emerges–you expect perhaps a Twilight Zone-style ironic twist for this kind of high-concept genre fare, but are instead presented with an entire series of them, one after the other, running well past what feels like an obvious stopping point. It feels a bit like just having finished a decadent restaurant dessert, only for the waiter to bring out two more desserts you hadn’t ordered, just as you’re standing up to leave. And more importantly, it robs a little bit from the tension of the central dynamic between Michelle and Howard that had formed the entire backbone of the story up to this point, leading to a final 15 minutes that suddenly sweeps the film’s previous thesis under the rug.

None of this is enough to diminish the skillfully tense, suspenseful filmmaking that makes up the bulk of 10 Cloverfield Lane, which is very much worth enjoying for the disconcerting menace of Goodman and the pluck of Winstead. But it may make you wish that a film with the resources of 10 Cloverfield Lane could be made without the filmmaker needing that recognizable word in the title in order to get the go-ahead.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.