After a surprise reveal in January and a pre-release marketing campaign loaded with cryptic puzzles, J.J. Abrams’ 10 Cloverfield Lane, an anti-sequel and spiritual successor to the 2008 found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, has hit cinemas.
For this installment of Double Takes, Emerald writers Chris Berg and Emerson Malone, with nothing but a pair of tickets, large cups of Slusho! in hand, ventured deep into 10 Cloverfield Lane to let you know if this mystery box is worth opening.
Watch the 10 Cloverfield Lane trailer here:

Chris’s take:

Back in 2008, a movie under the vague title of Cloverfield burst into cinemas with a fresh take on the rapidly stale monster movie genre. Putting the viewer directly in view of the chaos happening in New York City streets, it was a cinematic experience that divided fans and critics, but changed the conversation about science fiction under its’ own rules. 10 Cloverfield Lane follows up on all of those revolutionary themes, all while being a structural contrary to the original movie. It’s a character-rich drama that values script over spectacle and accomplishes something stunning in the process.
Rather than guiding the audience on a theme-park worthy tour of a crumbling NYC, Lane takes place almost entirely from the confines of an underground bunker. Director Dan Trachtenberg makes a stunning feature debut here, making the tight confines feel claustrophobic without ever becoming tired. He’s generously helped by three actors that all deliver stunning, nuanced performances that are absolutely captivating to watch.
John Goodman stands out amongst the small cast as Howard, the bunker’s owner and operator. His motivations, rationale and intention are almost impossible to pin down and Goodman beautifully sows these seeds of doubt in his portrayal.
The dominant force at play in Lane though, is easily the script. Whiplash scribe Damien Chazelle revised an original script by Matt Stuecken and Matt Stuecken to fit within the Cloverfield mythos, and the end result is a masterfully tense drama that will keep you engaged from the first frame to the last. All three characters are detailed, human and form unexpected relationships. The story is also brilliantly structured, walking through many of the expected beats in this sort of narrative, but knowing when to jump the action forward in order to defy audience expectations. It’s the sort of work you would expect to see out of the indie circuit, but with all the lavish bells and whistles that major studio funding can accommodate. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a true gem, and one that just might shift how we think about blockbuster science fiction.

Emerson’s take:
The 2008 Cloverfield, packaged in a perpetually wobbly camcorder recording, compelled moviegoers to load up on Dramamine; likewise, 10 Cloverfield Lane ought to come with a similar prescription, as even its title cards are enough to induce heart arrhythmia.
Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Emmet (Jake Gallagher, Jr.) and Howard (John Goodman) are cooped up inside Howard’s homemade fallout shelter, located beneath his farm outside Lake Charles, Louisiana. Howard’s speculation on the threat outside veers toward an abstract, xenophobic fear (he regularly cites “the Russians” developing nuclear weapons as a likely cause), while those who watched the first film can guess the scale of the danger.
Michelle wakes up in Howard’s bomb shelter after a brutal car accident; her leg is harnessed to a wall, her arm hooked up to an IV bag. The allusions to Misery are pretty obvious, but to equate Goodman’s performance as Howard to Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes would sell his performance criminally short. While Wilkes harbored a literary fixation for her captive, Howard’s complicated psychology adds a beautiful ambiguity to the film, which regularly feels like a Twilight Zone episode.
This movie has a fetishistic attention to detail; the bunker is like a time capsule from the Atomic Age, with amenities like Howard’s anachronistic jukebox, a collection of VHS tapes and a handful of rain-damaged magazines for tweens, increasingly vandalized in pen. And the film holds a disquieting emphasis on the ambient sound: the hum in an air duct, the nasal drone of a generator, the tight clenching of Howard’s fat, veiny fists when he gets irritated.
Even the movie’s midway musical montage, which would have felt clumsy and superfluous in a lesser movie that didn’t have Cloverfield’s grace, is scored expertly by “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tommy James and the Shondells. During this sequence, Emmet and Michelle watch a VHS of a movie called Cannibal Airlines. The musical choice must be deliberate, as one verse goes, “The beating of our hearts is the only sound” and the song’s lax lub-dub, lub-dub beat pattern is underlined by a bloody scream coming from the TV. You can’t get a break.
Follow Chris Berg and Emerson Malone on Twitter @ChrisBerg25 and @allmalone, respectively