10 Cloverfield Lane by Dan Trachtenberg (review)

10 Cloverfield Lane is an unusual addition to any line-up of recent notable sf films, for it goes to great pains to obscure its most apparent genre affiliations until its finale. Through tonal playfulness, narrative convention and generic innovation, such repudiation challenges our strategies for categorising, experiencing or contextualising genre films. Further complicating issues is the fact that this film clearly constructs meaning through its relationship to other transmedia texts produced by its production company, Bad Robot, which begs questions about the construction of nascent franchises as well as the ability of deeply interconnected media texts to stand on their own.

The film begins as aspiring fashion designer Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) flees New Orleans after an argument with her fiancé. As she drives through rural Louisiana, her car is run off the road. When Michelle wakes up, shackled by her injured leg to the wall in a cinderblock room, the framing and bleak mise-en-scène make deliberate nods towards so-called 'torture porn' films such as those of the Saw franchise (2004–). Michelle displays impressive resourcefulness, adapting her crutch into a weapon and lighting a fire to draw her jailer to her. However, she is soon given the reassuring impression that her captor – intimidating ex-Navy survivalist Howard (John Goodman) – is ostensibly benevolent. He has forcibly confined Michelle and a genial local handyman, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr), to his homely, well-stocked underground doomsday shelter, where he says they must stay for the foreseeable future to survive the fallout of some massive attack of unknown origin.

The film is tonally varied, often leveraging humour against horror. There are persistent moments of tongue-in-cheek comedy, many centred on the sheer oddity of the shelter's cheery mid-century suburban American décor. This frames the awkward domesticity as a distorted 'father knows best' sitcom in which Emmett and Michelle take on the roles of wayward children and Howard becomes the long-suffering patriarch – something exacerbated by one's potential knowledge of John Goodman's paternal role in the long-running blue-collar sitcom Roseanne (US 1988–97, 2018–). Nonetheless, much of the film takes on the taut tone and the tense visual grammar of the psychological thriller, rendering the cheery space of the shelter a well-furnished prison. For all his magnanimity, it is apparent that Howard is actually deeply disturbed. His character obviously ticks every box in the abuser's playbook: he is controlling, moody, deeply paranoid and prone to sudden bursts of violence. He infantilises Michelle, and is jealous of her friendship with Emmett. Indeed, Michelle soon realises that Howard is the one who ran her off the road and kidnapped her. She and Emmett deduce that Howard may have also abducted and killed another woman before her, and they covertly plan their escape. And yet, Howard is not lying about an above-ground catastrophe; Michelle sees for herself the visceral evidence of some type of chemical weapon. We are therefore asked to entertain the possibility that although Howard is some sort of psychopath, he might also be their best chance at survival. All this situates the film within the broader context of apocalyptic or dystopian sf dramas.

The film's final act performs a remarkable about-face when we learn that the attack is part of a larger alien invasion of (at least) the southern United States. This abrupt shift in tone, pace and even spatiality re-contextualises the prior action while also interrogating how our knowledge of the conventions of genre shapes our expectations of narrative and our viewing experience. After a violent altercation that leaves Emmett dead, Howard dying and the shelter in flames, Michelle escapes in a homemade hazmat suit and respirator. However, her relief that the air is now breathable is countered by her horror at the sight of distant, distinctly non-human aircraft that are soon attracted by an explosion from the bunker. The film's previously claustrophobic framing and often long, tense...