I AM UNRELIABLE
So, there will be spoilers in this essay. Like, seriously. Like, this essay will be about 88% spoilers. So if you plan to see 10 Cloverfield Lane at any point in your life and you want to do so unspoiled, this essay is not for you.
So: 10 Cloverfield Lane. Good movie! Not like revelatory or anything, but solidly constructed, inventively plotted, well-acted, and frequently surprising. The premise is tight: A young woman named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), fleeing a bad relationship, gets into a bad car accident and wakes up chained up inside a bunker-cum-bomb shelter owned by a man named Howard, played by John Goodman. She’s terrified, but he assuages those fears: He’s not a crazy pervert, he tells her he’s saved her life because the Earth has recently been attacked by aliens using some sort of gas weapon, and everyone outside the bunker is dead.
And off we go. 10 Cloverfield Lane has a lot of fun with expectations, zigging and zagging several times as it fools the audience, and it does so using the oldest trick in the book: The film literally tells you exactly what’s happening in the first twenty minutes or so, but the audience dismisses the information because of the batshit, unreliable character who delivers it. Namely, Howard, who Goodman portrays as violently deranged even when he’s being quiet and plaintive. Because Howard is so obviously nuts, when he tells us aliens have attacked, we dismiss it. Guess what? That’s exactly what’s happened and Howard is 100% correct!
That was unexpected for me, because I fell for the oldest trick. I tried to be smart, because I like leaning over to my wife and telling what’s going to happen in movies five minutes before it does happen, but I got fooled this time, because Howard couldn’t possibly be right. I figured something weird was going on, of course, but I also figured it couldn’t be an alien gas attack, because that’s what Howard said it was.
Of course, Howard also turns out to be a deranged pervert just as Michelle feared he was, which is more complicated because Howard also specifically denies that. And yet his unreliability didn’t fool me there–nor was it intended to–because, again, Goodman plays him as the Creepiest Survivalist Ever from his first appearance on screen. His behavior negates his denial over his motives for rescuing/abducting Michelle, and thus we’re not fooled, whereas his behavior makes his statements about alien invasions seem crazy. The great part is, he’s lying about one thing and telling the truth about the other and we’re completely wrong about which is which.
The reason his secret motivation for saving Michelle remains a bit of a twist though is because it turns out to be aliens. When Michelle makes a desperate grab for his keys and gets thisclose to escaping the bunker, she’s stopped by the revelation that everyone outside is, in fact, dead of some horrible chemical attack, and that she is, in fact, safe in Howard’s bunker. And so the audience forgets all that stuff about Howard being a weirdo perv, because suddenly he’s a hero who’s been telling the truth this whole time.
It’s a nice pair of tricks, and they elevate the movie significantly. And they remind us that sometimes the best way to fool your audience is also the simplest.