10 Cloverfield Lane is so intense and scary at times that it brings tears to the eyes and makes you sweat. The reason: juxtaposition of power. A good horror movie is good because it takes all power away from the audience. 10 Cloverfield Lane is better because it lets you have a glorious taste of it, and then strips you of it all leaving you a wreck. The filmmaking on display here is unprecedented. This is a beautiful mix of everything the insanity of Fincher and the wonder of Spielberg. And this power is central to all the themes that make the film awesome in almost every single way. Dan Trachtenberg’s direction immediately reveals itself to be a master class of thriller filmmaking because of it. He teases the audience with power throughout the entirety of scenes showing establishing shots of items in the middle of action scenes that the characters will use immediately allowing telling the audience that this item will be integral in the character escaping the situation that they are currently in. There’s a twist to him setting up the scenes like this. On the flipside, this scene structure becomes so apparent that when it’s used in intense scenes that are playing against the audience; aka scenes when the item is not used to help escape, but instead brutally hurt it leaves us in an emotional panic picturing the many horrible things that could happen. It’s actually really clever as Trachtenberg uses his own ingenious scene structure to leave the audience in a state of shock...caused by themselves. We get all the power in scenes when they know the character will escape. We lose it all in the scenes when we know they won’t. If you’re wondering why no story has been mentioned...well this is a film built on the way the story progresses so knowing nothing of it is much better. What can be said is that the actors are all game for the continuing havok they thrust upon the audience. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is expertly cast as Michelle embodying one of the best female characters in a film in years. Michelle is actually the toughest character in the entire film, and trumps the other characters. John Goodman shows a reason for being relevant in the modern film industry... other than playing characters from the old film industry (Argo and more recently Trumbo). Goodman is playing a hard role having to fluctuate from happy to intimidating. Both Winstead and Goodman kind of outshine John Gallagher Jr. (Jim from The Newsroom) but Gallagher is still very interesting, and is actually given the most character as Goodman’s is only hinted at and Winstead’s is more about her actions. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a small scale work, but as you can tell it’s an excellently executed film. The only problems manifest in the fact that the ending seems a little rushed. This piece of work is so intelligently put together that it’s close to a masterpiece of suspense. Go see it I implore you. 10 Cloverfield Lane gets a 9.5 out of 10.
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December 2017
CategoriesAuthorHello welcome to FilmAnalyst. My name is Stephen Tronicek, and I really like movies. This is a way to get my opinions out to people. Thank you for visiting. |