10 Cloverfield Lane

A spin-off sidequel arriving eight years after the original was released, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie I really would've liked to be in the pitch meeting for. A mix of Barton Fink, Misery, and War of the Worlds might sound like a mess, but a lot of what we've got here is actually pretty solid. The two leads (Mary Winstead and John Gallagher, Jr.) play their roles well, if a bit straight-ahead, but John Goodman's performance is the real reason you're going to pay money for this: impressively overweight and messily overgrown with a scraggly beard, he gives off a sickly, near-death aura of general un-wellness -- Marlon Brando by way of Fallout.

The setup is thus: Winstead's character Michelle splits from the city and her boyfriend for reasons unknown before being run off the road by an unseen car -- cue one of the better title sequences in recent memory. She soon wakes up in an underground bunker inhabited by a dude named Emmett (Gallagher, Jr.), both under the watchful, crazy eyes of the warden of this dungeon, Howard (Goodman). None of them can leave, but not for the usual reasons -- according to Howard, the surface world has suffered some sort of catastrophe that has killed most everyone and turned the air into poison. The film then alternates between somewhat relaxed exploration/exposition (a montage of the gang enjoying life underground, for example) and more tense confrontations that due the bulk of the plot-work, which all involve Goodman acting insane and are, as a result, very compelling. He's the workhorse of 10 Cloverfield Lane, dragging the audience along through the quicksand of blandness when the film stumbles into it. While it's ostensibly a psychological thriller, there aren't as many nail-biter moments as I was expecting and the film seems more concerned with resolving the "is the air really poison or not" question while also tying into Cloverfield somehow. Because while this seems like a very compact and interesting psychological thriller, it's still related to Cloverfield in the end. I'll leave you to discover the specifics of that on your own, but if you're hoping that this might be the modern equivalent of The Conversation or Barton Fink should set your expectations properly -- ultimately 10 Cloverfield Lane is too interested in the sci-fi background of it's nascent little universe to really give these characters and this situation even time to really reach a boiling point. Despite all that, who knows when we'll see John Goodman in another role like this, if ever - that might be good enough of a reason to see it right there.

C+