Cloverfield (2008) was a masterpiece of movie marketing rather than moviemaking. A found footage flick with a Godzilla twist, it grabbed a huge opening weekend thanks to an innovative marketing campaign laden with Internet-based games and trailers that revealed little of the plot—and less of the monster terrorizing New York.
2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane has taken a similar route to theaters. Rumors of a sequel had long percolated through the blogosphere and then, out of nowhere, a teaser for 10 Cloverfield Lane was attached to 13 Hours. Then there was a Super Bowl spot and the requisite viral Internet games and, before you knew it, Cloverfield Mania is upon us again.
Those looking for a true sequel will be disappointed; 10 Cloverfield Lane doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Cloverfield. They’re not set in the same universe, and they don’t follow any of the same characters. It’s more like the second volume of an anthology—a feature-length series of Outer Limits episodes, maybe—that tackles similar themes and relies on unexpected twists in the narrative in the service of telling a totally different story.
10 Cloverfield Lane opens with Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) fleeing her fiancée. She leaves her engagement ring and keys on the table and hits the road. He calls, begging for her to return—and then she’s sideswiped off the road. When she wakes up her knee is in a brace, an IV is in her arm, and she’s been chained to a pipe. A murderous hideaway?
No, actually. A fallout shelter of some sort. The prepper who lives there is named Howard (John Goodman), and he brought her to his lair because, strangely enough, the world has ended.
At least, that’s what he says. The Russkies, or maybe the Russians, he says. Biological, chemical, nuclear: he’s not sure. All he knows is that the skin on his pigs has practically melted off. A former Navy tech, Howard had noticed an uptick in satellite chatter—possibly alien in origin, hard to say—so when he saw a bright flash in the distance and heard reports of attacks across the seaboard, he knew it was going down. Now he, Michelle, and a local boy named Emmett (John Gallaher Jr.) are all stuck underground—maybe for a year, maybe two; who’s to say how long the fallout will last?—while the world dies.
Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that all is not quite as it seems. And not necessarily in the ways you might predict. Goodman plays Howard with an air of unsettling menace, his natural heft and unshaven jowls doing almost as much work as his stilted speech and darting eyes. Winstead, meanwhile, alternates between ingénue and action hero, trying to make her escape—or decide if there’s anything worth escaping to. Is he her captor or savior? Or maybe a bit of both?
10 Cloverfield Lane is a slightly weird mixture of genres, part horror, part sci-fi, part family comedy, part domestic thriller. But it all works, and far more effectively than its predecessor. Alternately hilarious and terrifying, horrifying and tender, the small-scale drama shows that the cinematic anthology dreamed up by J.J. Abrams has a lot of potential.