I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail
Poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
--Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm"
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016, directed by Dan Trachtenberg) is not, as its distributor would have you believe, an actual sequel to Cloverfield. It is not a found footage film. It is not a kaiju film. It does not indulge in masochistic fantasies of mass destruction. It's a much more intimate film, one that distills the apocalypse down to a microcosm, one in which the biggest threats are human beings, not world-destroying events. At its core, this is a suspense drama rather than a monster movie, unless you want to count human beings as monsters. I'm entirely open to that possibility.
It's probably best to go into this film cold, so here's my usual disclaimer: here there be spoilers.
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