Starting life as a psychological thriller written on spec by Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken under the title The Cellar, this mutated into a distant relative of Matt Reeves’ sci-fi hit Cloverfield thanks to the involvement of JJ Abrams’s Bad Robot productions. With Whiplash writer/director Damien Chazelle now sharing screenwriting credit with Stuecken and Campbell, director Dan Trachtenberg’s feature debut finds Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Michelle waking up in an underground bunker after running her car off the road. With her are John Goodman’s Howard, a survivalist who insists that he saved Michelle not only from the crash, but also from some unspecified toxic catastrophe above ground; and John Gallagher Jr’s Emmett, whose status is initially uncertain, but who believes Howard’s tales of an apocalypse. What follows is a twisty, sinewy three-hander in which each of the trapped trio variously trusts and suspects the others’ moves and motives – more The Disappearance of Alice Creed meets Room than War of the Worlds. All three cast members play their roles to a tee, with Goodman walking a thin line between threat and pathos, while Winstead does a terrific job of leading the audience through the increasingly outlandish revelations of the plot. The film-makers keep us guessing about what’s happening above ground (A nuclear strike? The monster attack of Cloverfield? Or some fantastical fabrication?) but the real drama lies in the interpersonal chamber-piece dynamics of these increasingly frazzled characters.
