The MCU has ruined cinema in so many ways. I mean I’m a fan of many of their films but the way that they essentially steamrolled Hollywood has created numerous problems. Listen to Martin Scorsese for the details, but one of those issues was that it made every movie try to become part of its own cinematic universe.

10 Cloverfield Lane is the perfect example of this. Cloverfield was a JJ Abrams film in which…actually, you know what? I’m not going to spoil what Cloverfield was about. If you haven’t seen that film, if you haven’t even heard of it then I’m gonna let you exist in ignorance. It isn’t a bad film, but staying in the dark on that film is a very good thing when it comes to watching this one.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a movie that was developed on its own. It was only later when they actually moved forward into the process of making it that they decided to make it part of the Cloverfield Cinematic Universe and tacked on an ending to fit that sequence, and well, that was a dumb idea.

Anyway, Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Michelle, a woman who as the film begins is running away from her fiancé. They’ve had a fight and she can’t handle it.

Out on the road, in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, she has a terrible accident that renders her unconscious. Sometime later she awakes inside a bare, cinderblock bunker. There is an IV connected to her arm and a brace connected to her leg. She’s also chained to the wall. Terrified she tries to escape, but to no avail.

Then in walks a massive, hulking man. His name is Howard (John Goodman). He tells her she can’t escape, tosses her a key to her chains, and then shuts and locks the door. Eventually, he lets her out and shows her around his rather large, and fully accommodated underground bunker. He tells her a story about how he rescued her from that car wreck and brought her down there to escape…something. Something bad. An attack of some sort. He thinks it was Russians or possibly aliens but they’ve made the air poisonous. Only they survived and they are stuck down there for at least a year.

The they also includes Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) Howard’s neighbor who helped build the bunker and is a believer in the invasion story. He saw it with his own eyes. Michelle is skeptical. Howard is clearly unstable. One minute he’s a kindly, country farmer, the next he’s grabbing onto her shoulders and screaming. He built this bunker expecting something terrible and now he’s imagined it.

The screenplay wavers. There are moments when it seems as if Howard is crazy, that the outside terrors are just his imagination. And then a moment later we’ll see something that makes us believe. As the film moves forward Michelle begins to realize that the horrors inside might just be worse than the horrors outside.

It is an incredibly well-constructed, tension-filled, little horror-thriller. I love films that are set entirely inside a single setting and the bunker is a fantastic place for this movie. It is small and claustrophobic while still having enough rooms and crannies to keep things interesting. The film twists and turns in the most fascinating ways. When she first finds herself chained up in that little room we expect the worst. We expect what horror movies usually give us in those scenarios. But the film doesn’t give us that, it gives us something else.

The ending does tie itself to the Cloverfield universe and I don’t really love that, but also it is surprisingly tense. Giving us an answer to the question as to what is going on outside was always going to be a letdown, and yet again it worked for me on a beat-for-beat cellular level. I mean it was scary.

Goodman gives an absolutely fantastic performance. I wish he’d been given more opportunities like this. Winstead and Gallagher are likewise superb. It isn’t a perfect movie, but it’s a really good one.