Eighth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series: #12 10 Cloverfield Lane

Here's another crowd-sourced scary movie recommendation, this time from my college friend Meredith T:  10 Cloverfield Lane.  (To be honest, I had already had it on my list but after she said that it freaked her out, I moved it to the head of the line.)  Only tangentially related to Cloverfield, this flick is tense, well-acted and claustrophobic and really solid until the last fifteen minutes or so when we see how it connects to the first movie.

After a car accident, runaway bride Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) awakens in an underground bunker, chained to the wall.  Her rescuer (and jailor) is Howard, a hardcore conspiracy theorist/survivalist played wonderfully - and by "wonderfully" I mean "terrifyingly" - by the awesome John Goodman.  There's a third guy in the bunker too, a local kid who used to work for Howard and who lends enough credence to Howard's story that Michelle finally listens to it, after quite a lot of terror and trying to escape first.  During her first escape attempt, Michelle sees something outside that makes her believe.  You see, Howard's story is that something has gone very very wrong in the world above: something happened and a horrific blast (possibly atomic, possibly chemical warfare, possibly extra-terrestrial) has contaminated and killed most of the humans.  The three of them settle into a fairly peaceable domestic routine until an air scrubber breaks down.  Michelle, as the smallest person in the bunker, has to crawl through the air ducts and fix the machinery.  While in the mechanical room, she sees something else that makes her determined to escape, contaminated world or not.

As I mentioned above, the acting is fantastic here.  For most of 10 Cloverfield Lane, things are very tense indeed.  My claustrophobia kicked into high gear while Michelle was in the air ducts and later, when things go badly, they go very badly.  It's only at the very end, when things shift from tense character study to more predictable fare that I felt let down.  For the most part, however, this flick holds up.