If M. Night Shymalan made Kimmy Schmidt, it would be something like 10 Cloverfield Lane. That is, it’s about a girl trapped in a bunker with a really terrible twist.
The film opens with intensity. With very little dialogue and
a heavy score, we watch protagonist Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) leaving
her partner – running away “like she always does”. The sudden impact of a car
crash quickly throws that plot out the window as she wakes up in what appears
to be a cell.
In fact, it’s an underground fallout shelter built by Howard
(John Goodman), your typically crazy middle American who’s paranoid about alien
invasions and is keeping Michelle locked up for her own safety alongside Howard’s
neighbour Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.). Apparently there’s been some sort of
chemical attack on Earth. Leaving the shelter would be suicide.
The remains of director Dan Trachtenberg’s film is
essentially one long guessing game. Who is telling the truth? Are there really
aliens roaming the planet? Is Howard really a monster? Who bloody cares?
Trachtenberg asks too much of his audience to buy into such
a ludicrous premise. Goodman plays Howard like a pantomime villain, staring
into the middle distance as if he’s been studying ‘Psychotic Bad Guy 101’. The
idea that he could actually be right about the aliens is laughable. Instead, we
get what’s meant to be a tight thriller about a woman stuck in confinement with
a potential killer, who forms some weird dysfunctional family before eventually
coming to her senses (i.e. what the audience have already been internally
screaming for what seems like hours).
That Howard *spoiler warning* is actually right about
the aliens is just plain ridiculous, but then aliens are the only thing tying
this film to its spiritual predecessor Cloverfield
(a far superior film). Michelle eventually escapes the shelter to be chased
by an alien creature that looks like somebody spliced a leech and a penis
together, before then destroying a giant UFO with a lighter and bottle of booze
that just happened to be in her
vicinity. Oh, and that’s after she creates a whole chemical protection suit and
gas mask out of a shower curtain and a soda bottle because she just happens to be a clothes designer. Thrifty.
“Females are strong as hell”, goes the Kimmy Schmidt theme song. And that might be the case here, but
Michelle is offered very little depth of character. Neither are her supporting
characters. The film’s tagline notes “Monsters come in many forms” and asks us
to question who is the real monster: Howard or the aliens. In practice it’s
probably Trachtenberg himself for creating such a laughably bad thriller. Now
pass me the Pinot Noir.
1/5
Watch: 10 Cloverfield
Lane is out now.