10 Cloverfield Lane

Rating: 8/10 (2 April 2016)

Driving fast on a lonely road while leaving New Orleans and her fiancé, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), an aspiring young clothing designer, crashes her car and is knocked unconscious. She awakens, with a brace on her knee and an IV needle in her arm, handcuffed to a pipe in a sealed underground room. Her captor, Howard (John Goodman), an ex-Navy survivalist, claims to have rescued her from a catastrophic attack, either nuclear or chemical, that killed everyone at ground level, and, to display his benign intentions, he leads her to the shelter's cheerfully well-stocked rec room. Is Howard a predator who's Michelle, or is he a paranoid whose worst fears have come true? And what about Emmet (John Gallagher, Jr.), the young man who also lives there—is he an accomplice, a victim, or a fellow-survivor? This simple and suspenseful horror thriller calls for spare technique, but the director, Dan Trachtenberg, smothers the action in showy camera work and an overly insistent music score. But, as the mystery unravels, he reveals flashes of a giddily hyperbolic pop imagination.