10 CLOVERFIELD LANE
Its title suggests a connection to the J.J. Abrams-produced 2008 found-footage monster mashCloverfield, and its bombshell-dropping finale certainly furthers that affiliation. In most respects, however, Dan Trachtenberg's film—originally conceived as a standalone film, unrelated to a presumptive Cloverfield franchise—is simply a nifty claustrophobic thriller that often feels like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. Aside from its brief bookending sequences, Trachtenberg's story is set entirely in the bomb shelter of John Goodman's survivalist antagonist, where Mary Elizabeth Winstead's young woman awakens (after a car accident) to hear that the world has been fatally contaminated during some sort of ill-defined doomsday attack. Whether Winstead can believe Goodman's bunker dictator proves the crux of this beguiling mystery, which ratchets up tension with painstaking patience and care. With John Gallagher, Jr. as the subterranean shelter's third inhabitant, 10 Cloverfield Lane develops and exploits its characters' frazzled dynamics with anxiety-inducing results, and in the process provides the always great Goodman with a role of alarming ambiguous motivations.
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