10 Cloverfield Lane is a claustrophobic mystery thriller starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Michelle), John Goodman (Howard), and John Gallagher Jr. (Emmet).

The movie starts out with Michelle driving her car down a very grim looking highway. She periodically gets calls from her boyfriend, but ignores her angered boyfriend’s pleas. As the score and the anger in her boyfriend’s calls rise, the opening scene ends with her crashing her car into a ditch far below the highway. She wakes up in a mysterious fallout shelter with two men who claim the world has been attacked.

This film was packed to the brim with tension throughout its runtime of 140 minutes.  More than once, director Dan Trachtenberg uses lingering shots that make the audience so uncomfortable they want to look away, but cannot take their eyes off the screen. In some scenes, once the characters stop talking, all that is left is the mistrust of each other as seen on their faces.

Howard helps with this tension as you cannot quite figure him out. He may seem borderline crazy in one scene, then completely rational in the next, solving the other characters’ problems. This effect is all the more furthered by Michelle, as she is constantly trying to figure Howard out, keeping the audience on edge. Praise is due to the director for making a movie in such limited space so interesting and fast paced, while retaining the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped.

Even though the film was shot in a very small space, it is filled to the brim with detail in its set and script. The set hints at a history behind Howard’s rough and menacing exterior. Another noticeable detail was the subtle foreshadowing that rewards the most observant film goers.

One small problem with the movie is its ending, but don’t worry- there are no spoilers here. The build up to the ending has viewers on the edge of their seats, but the last 10 minutes or so are spent going in a completely different direction that throws off the suspense it had built up. The tension was gone as the film tried to justify its use of the Cloverfield name in those last 10 minutes.

Overall, 10 Cloverfield Lane was a tense and subtle movie that used a small space to its full potential, but was weakened by the name in the title. 10 Cloverfield Lane is good for anyone who loves movies filled with tension, but if you’re looking for a sequel to Cloverfield, you can skip this.

Grade: B+