Bunkering Down
10 Cloverfield Lane / directed by Dan Trachtenberg
10 Cloverfield Lane is a tight, smart captivity-survival narrative, drawing on tropes of abduction, terrorism, and female empowerment to propel its tale. It’s like some fun, twisted karmic twin to Room, minus the kid and with existential gloom in place of parental anguish. The predicament in which protagonist Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself has various shades of ambiguity from the start, but it’s definitely not good; following a car accident during a long-distance drive, she awakens to find herself shackled to the wall of an unknown basement room, her arm hooked into an IV that may or may not be dispensing helpful fluids into her body. It’s a good example of the film’s charm that she immediately begins working on a way to escape in clever and resourceful ways. Her gaoler then appears; conveying a no-good combination of menace and courtesy, Howard (John Goodman) ominously warns her to get used to her surroundings. Michelle then unexpectedly overhears what sounds like an altercation between Howard and another man; but when she meets the latter shortly afterward, bearded, ball-capped Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) claims not to be a captive at all, and even says he wants to be there. More incredibly, he backs up the story that Howard had told Michelle about why she can’t leave, and which she’d immediately dismissed - that there has been a chemical attack outside, and no one is left alive.
Of course, this only proves to Michelle that Emmett is either a fool or brainwashed, or perhaps both. Her continuing attempts to outwit Howard are ingenious; she’s a captive who makes a keen attempt at reading the mind of her jailer. Backing off of his initial sternness, Howard seems a little too eager to create a simulated family, one with subtle but creepily eroticized overtones towards this woman that he seems to compare to his daughter. Michelle uses what she can understand of his psychology to her advantage in subtle and unexpected ways.
Our brief and circumscribed views of the world outside the bunker cunningly increase rather than puncture the sense of claustrophobia, not to mention amplify the mystery and latent dread that permeate 10 Cloverfield Lane. And one of the movie’s strengths is that the smallnessof the bunker never extends into visual dullness; the space is curiously tasteful and dare I say pleasant, evoking a sort of midcentury feel - the age of the nuclear bomb shelter, right? If anything, the place ends up feeling larger than it really is.
10 Cloverfield Lane never loses its sense of fun, without sacrificing its carefully constructed tension. Let’s just say that Michelle’s fashion skills may come in handy for preparing a handmade outfit suitable to resist the possible biochemical contamination outside, and that this suit may employ for its material a discarded rubber-ducky printed shower curtain. I remain torn over the film’s final act; the story goes in a direction that may be audacious or foolish, depending on your disposition. The creators of 10 Cloverfield Lane seem to be aware that with such a phenomenal build-up, any move into explanation is bound to disappoint; and so when they change the game on us, part of me really couldn’t blame them; and as time has gone by, I’m liking their resolution more and more.