10 Cloverfield Lane, film review: A superior, claustrophobic doomsday tale

(12A) Dan Trachtenberg, 103 mins. Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr, John Goodman

Below the surface: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher Jr star in the creepy ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ (Paramount Pictures)

Anyone going to 10 Cloverfield Lane expecting a monster movie will be sorely disappointed. This belated sequel (or "blood relative" as it has been styled) to 2008's Cloverfield is as much about what people get up to in their cellars as it is a conventional, apocalyptic sci-fi drama. Produced by JJ Abrams (fresh from the triumph of Star Wars: The Force Awakens), it is a taut and very well-crafted psychological thriller, full of Hitchcockian flourishes and with an enjoyably macabre sense of humour that leavens its grimmer moments.

The film benefits from a very strong performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the redoubtable heroine, Michelle, who (like Ripley in the Alien movies) refuses to play the part of the victim. In the course of the film, she endures every form of physical and psychological trauma imaginable – and yet she always comes out fighting. When she is crawling down ventilation shafts in her T-shirt, she even looks like Ripley. Michelle is resourceful enough to turn the tip of a crutch into a home-made spear or to make herself a gas mask out of water bottles and bric-a-brac. As played by Winstead, she has a feral quality at moments of danger and an absolute lack of self-pity.

As 10 Cloverfield Lane begins, we see Michelle throwing her possessions in a suitcase and then driving at breakneck speed through the night. She is running away. It is typical of the way the film plays with our expectations that she isn't fleeing some demonic creature or psychotic killer. It's a relationship gone wrong that has her scarpering. Her boyfriend Ben calls her, begging her to come back but she won't pick up the phone.

In an era of bloated blockbusters, 10 Cloverfield Lane is refreshingly pared down – a chamber piece rather than an epic. The shots of Michelle in the car and the wonderfully atmospheric, Bernard Herrmann-like music rekindle memories of Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's Psycho. Director Dan Trachtenberg and his screenwriters Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle (from Oscar-winner Whiplash) deliberately withhold information. As viewers, we are as disoriented as Michelle herself the moment her car spins off the road. We know something is awry, but whether it's a hurricane or an alien invasion or simply a squall in the heroine's private life isn't immediately specified. Whatever the case, the end result is the same. She is a captive in a bunker.

Cellars and secret hideouts are an increasingly commonplace motif in films. They are generally places of fear, darkness and criminality, but they can also have a womb-like quality. They're far away from the problems of the outside world. Here, as in Ulrich Seidl's documentaries or in Lenny Abrahamson's Room, the setting is both prison and refuge.

Years ago, John Goodman had his breakthrough as the dependable, blue-collar husband opposite Roseanne Barr in TV comedy Roseanne. Here, as the avuncular Howard, he is playing a distorted version of the same character. The tagline for 10 Cloverfield Lane is that "monsters come in many forms". Howard seems the dependable everyman type, but he might also be a psychotic kidnapper with a paranoid terror about what lurks beyond his sealed-in underground shelter.

Goodman has often brought a sourness and a streak of malice to his roles. You know that he can turn in an instant. Here, he has built his own self-enclosed world, complete with its own air system, larders, TV and family heirlooms. There is plenty to read – everything from Call of the Wild to books on surviving nuclear apocalypse. The irony is that the main room looks just like the set of the typical US sitcom. Howard likes to have meals with his captives/companions, Michelle and Emmett (John Gallagher Jr). He enjoys charades, board games and watching Pretty in Pink on video. We know, though, that he is capable of extreme brutality. Like Michelle, we are never quite sure how to read him. He tells stories of his daughter, who loved Paris, but whether these are true or not is impossible to tell. (The script deliberately leaves us in the dark.)

Howard, Michelle and Emmett play their own version of happy families. They are the only principal characters in a story that could easily have seemed claustrophobic in the extreme. There is next to no sunlight. Howard's underground lair isn't very large. Director Trachtenberg reacts to the extreme confinement of the settings by making little incidents seem as tense and dramatic as the huge set-pieces in films on a broader canvas. For example, a handcuffed Michelle trying to retrieve her possessions and mobile phone from the other side of a room is portrayed as if it is an epic quest. Likewise, when she comes up with a scheme to steal a set of keys, this is shot in as painstaking and elaborate a way as a heist in a gangster movie. The director knows just how to use sweaty close-ups to stoke the tension and he is helped throughout by Julian "Bear" McCreary's music, which is used throughout to heighten the eeriness and sense of dread.

Early on, 10 Cloverfield Lane looks as if it might turn into some Eli Roth-style slice of torture porn – yet another grim tale of a woman chained up in a dungeon, preyed on by a sadistic abductor. Thankfully, the film-makers don't get caught going down such a cul-de-sac. The 12A certificate is a signal that the bloodletting won't be too extreme.

One challenge that the movie can't overcome is how to combine the psychological, character-based elements with its more conventional sci-fi/horror movie tropes. There are many loose ends in the plotting – characters who aren't identified properly and behaviour that isn't explained. The end scenes bear little relation to what has gone before. Even so, this is very superior genre fare – a doomsday tale that manages to be slick, creepy and intimate, while even managing to throw in some final-reel pyrotechnics.