Great successful followup sequel

Rating: 8/10 (21 December 2016)

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) is an intense, claustrophobic surprise of a film. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Michelle who, in the film's urgent opening sequence, desperately flees New Orleans to escape from her fiancé Ben for reasons unexplained. In the dead of the night her car plunges off the road and she awakes to find herself a prisoner in a concrete-walled cell, attached to a drip and fed and watered by Howard (John Goodman). Michelle is understandably dubious– Howard is clearly a survivalist and she soon finds that she's not alone well-stocked hideaway. She meets Emmet (John Gallagher Jr) who apparently witnessed the attack and fled to the bunker. It soon becomes evident that something has happened outside and the trio settle into an uneasy existence underground, prepared to sit out the two years or so it might take for conditions above ground to sustain human life.
The film is restless and uneasy, punctuated by a sense that something just isn't right here, that the whole story isn't being told. Edgy and discomfiting, we're never allowed to sit back and relax; we're waiting for the next trauma, the next moment of explosive confrontation. Winstead is brilliant as the resourceful, desperate Michelle but Goodman is quite astonishing as gruff man- mountain Howard and the relationship that develops between the pair crackles with tension and barely-disguised threat. The film's slow burn eventually erupts into fire and violence and, without drifting too far into spoiler territory, it's fair to suggest that fans of Cloverfield frustrated by the intimate human drama of the first hour or so of Cloverfield Lane are likely to feel a bit more at home with the extraordinary turn of events which send the last reel hurtling off into an entirely different, but no less exhilarating, direction. The film does take a unique and quite different turn in the final end showing a creation of monster attacks, similar to the original. The ending also does suggest there will be another sequel. Which can be quite forward looking towards.