Claustrophobic. John Goodman is superb.

Rating: Null/10 (4 February 2017)

I watched this at home on BD from my public library. It is not the kind of movie my wife watches.
It is set somewhere in Louisiana "40 miles outside Lake Charles", which is pretty near where I grew up. But it is filmed in New Orleans and surrounding areas up river.
As the movie starts Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle is packing her stuff to leave her apartment, including the bottle of Scotch which will come in handy later. She feels and we hear a loud explosion. We have no idea what is going on. On the road she gets hit by a truck and knocked down an incline. A day or two later she wakes up, with an IV in her arm and shackled to her bed.
She quickly finds out that she is with John Goodman as Howard, in the emergency shelter he built beneath his house, equipped with an air purifier, emergency power, and a stock of food supplies. He says something bad has happened, either an attack from a hostile nation or possible an alien invasion. He says the air outside is not safe to breathe.
She also soon finds out there is another person there, John Gallagher Jr. as Emmett, who had helped Howard build the shelter and who voluntarily entered the shelter for safety. He is a former athlete, not the brightest bulb in the pack.
So as an audience member we have no idea what is really going on. Much of the middle of the movie plays out as three people forming a routine together. But Michelle never accepts that everyone outside is dead, she keeps trying to find ways to escape.
It is a very well done story and Goodman is superb, alternately serious, or funny, or menacing.
SPOILERS: Howard indeed was a bit messed up, at one point he shoots and kills Emmet. Some old photos provide evidence that he probably had kidnapped some young ladies. When Michelle does manage to escape, with a hand-made protective suit, the building goes up in flames, Howard dies. But she sees migrating birds in the air, so it must be safe. Then she sees an alien ship that hunts her down and is in the process of capturing her when she takes some paper and the Scotch and makes a Molotov Cocktail, throws it into the alien's mouth, which crashes the alien ship. In the car she gets a radio transmission from Baton Rouge, citizens are beginning to win, they need people in Houston with military or medical skills, so she turns left in the road, the sign pointing to Houston