written by David Steffen
10 Cloverfield Lane is a 2016 suspense movie published by Paramount Pictures.
After an argument, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) leaves her boyfriend and drives solo across Louisiana late at night. After hearing reports on the radio of sweeping blackouts on the east coast, a pickup drives her off the road.
She wakes up in a cellar on a mattress on the floor, hooked up to an IV bag, and with a brace on her knee chained to the wall. Soon she meets Howard (John Goodman), who claims to have rescued her from the side of the road and is nursing her back to health, and that he is keeping her there for her own good. They’re in a fallout shelter under his farm, and he claims they’re both lucky to be there, because he says that war has broken out and the shelter is the only thing keeping them safe from the fallout.
He unchains her brace from the wall and lets her loose, and she tries to attack him to get loose but fails. She meets the other resident of the shelter, Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), and find Henry’s oppressive rules laid over their life together there. Is there really a war going on out there? Can she and Emmett find a way to escape? Is there anything to escape to?
If you’ve seen the movie Cloverfield you might have some suspicion about what’s really really going on above ground, but the connection was so tenuous (only the similarity in name and knowing they were both J.J.Abrams movies. I had that suspicion, but I also suspected that Abrams might’ve just chosen the title as a red herring so that you had to constantly wonder about what is going on up there.
Great suspense movie, and I was never sure where it was going. John Goodman plays a solid villain, creepy and malevolent even while he puts on a guise of reasonability in between threats. Excellent movie, high stakes, always kept me guessing. It’s free to view on Amazon Prime.
