"10 Cloverfield Lane": Another (pleasant) surprise from J.J. Abrams' mystery box

There sure is a lot of space there. Enough for a monster, perhaps? 

Though I consider myself a J.J. Abrams fan (I love LOST and Fringe, which he created, and do not think he screwed up Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens), it was only recently that I watched his famous TED talk* on his obsession with mystery. I encourage you to watch it below:


If you don't feel like watching it, here's a summary: Abrams likes films as much for what they don't show as for what they do. He considers curiosity and mystery essential aspects--perhaps the essential aspects--of the cinematic experience. To him, the best films expertly balance mystery and exposition, intriguing us with the former, and satisfying our intrigue with well-executed doses of the latter.

Whatever you think of Abrams' storytelling methods, he's used them to considerable success. And somehow, either while still directing The Force Awakens or just after finishing it, he also produced a new film firmly in the Abrams mold: 10 Cloverfield Lane, which came out this weekend. As befits the Abrams' style, news of this movie surprised me: It wasn't even on my radar until a few weeks ago, when a trailer attached to 13 Hours revealed it had "Cloverfield," in the title. I'm a fan of 2008's Cloverfield, which Abrams also produced, so I instantly became interested in seeing what this next object to emerge from the Abrams' mystery box would be (and in whether it would continue the story of Cloverfield).

It didn't disappoint. 10 Cloverfield Lane is about Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a woman who wakes up after a car accident rapped in an underground bunker with Howard (John Goodman, who has the film's best performance), a doomsday prepper who claims both that he saved her life and that the world above the bunker has come to an end (a plot that bears some resemblance to an arc from the second season of LOST). They are joined by Emmett (John Gallagher, Jr.), a well-meaning young man and neighbor of Howard's whose genuine claim to have fought his way into the bunker--he helped build it and so knew about it--when the world supposedly began to end lends credence to Howard's account.

Michelle, Howard, and Emmett are the only three characters in the movie**, and almost all of it takes place in Howard's bunker. Director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriters Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecker, Damien Chazelle generate an impressively tense and claustrophobic thriller from these strict parameters. Virtually every scene, every object, and every conversation acts in service of an anxiety-inducing trip through the mystery box; I cannot, for example, think of another movie in which one learns so much about the main characters from a single scene of their playing a board game***. The film keeps the answers to the questions of Howard's sanity and the outside world's status thrillingly ambiguous through an undulating, sinusoidal**** introduction of new information that suggests answers in both directions. In good Abrams fashion, we are left guessing to the very end.

As for the end--well, the less I say, the better. Not because it ended poorly, mind you. Or maybe it did. In the spirit of the movie, I will keep that ambiguous in this review. And I'll do that because 10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie best enjoyed with as little prior knowledge as possible. The gradual unfolding of its mystery works incredibly well when you don't know much about it going in.

This does, however, suggest one problem with the movie: Because it is so dependent on ambiguity and mystery, it might not hold up very well to repeat viewings. I wouldn't know, since I haven't seen it twice (yet). But like Cloverfield before it, 10 Cloverfield Lane may be more of an experience than a movie, by which I mean that the sensations of seeing the movie for the first time are inseparable from the movie itself. 

Many movies are that way, to be sure. But a possible over-reliance on mystery has always been one of the potential defects of the Abrams approach. Questions are fun, but most satisfying movies usually answer them (or at least provide possible answers). Most Abrams projects do eventually answer the questions they ask (and feel incomplete if they don't), but the mystery generated from the questions, in some cases, has in the process become so essential to the work at hand that, even if other dramatic elements are not neglected, the work loses its staying power once the mystery gets resolved. The loss of both repeat viewing value and potential timelessness may result.

I'm not sure yet if this is the case with 10 Cloverfield Lane. It is, at any rate, a remarkably clever, anxious, and disciplined thriller definitely worth seeing at least once. Abrams has taken yet another engaging mystery out of his box. Yet it remains to be seen how much is left in there, and whether what's pulled out remains good art once the mystery is revealed.

For Abrams, these may be the greatest mysteries of all.

*In part because I hate TED talks.
**There are two other people in the movie, but their appearances amount to cameos.
***Notice I said "a single scene." Thus, Jumanji and Zathura do not count, as technically those entire movies take place inside a board game.
****Credit to Rooney Columbus, with whom I saw the movie, for this word. Because of my poor history with math, it was not the first one that came to my mind to describe this movie's pattern of undulating information.