Avis des critiques

Trachtenberg keeps things moving even while the film hovers in a state of suspended terror, leaving us to continually wonder if the enemy comes from within or without. Ambiguity reigns—at least until a fairly direct final grace note, underlining the film's essential anti-isolationist stance.

This is exactly the kind of film we need more of – a psychological thriller full of rich ambiguity. This particular film, however, isn't very rich. It's well made, with the camera effortlessly lending shape to the cramped spaces (Room is another recent film that may come to mind); the director, Dan Trachtenberg, is a first-timer, and knows better than to ruin his big break by being sloppy. The script, however, is ungainly, with muddled motivations and clumsy touches.

The problem is that once the (bigger) picture finally gets filled in, the resultant portrait reveals a certain lack of imagination. Give 10 Cloverfield Lane credit for taking the feverish temperature of a country paralysed by its fear of the great unknown, but on a more basic level its final sequences feel like a cop-out – a capitulation to the same audience expectations it skilfully tweaks for so much of its running time.

10 Cloverfield Lane is a smart, original genre gem – a formula that doesn't always equate to a multiplex full of eyeballs, as the solid but unspectacular box office performances of It Follows and The Witch can attest.

Director Dan Trachtenberg's feature debut was, by most accounts, a more humble three-folks-in-a-room thriller onto which Abrams and screenplay polisher Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) grafted a few blink-and-you'll-miss-'em callbacks to the earlier film, as well as an alien invasion stinger. The stitching sure shows, though as with most Abrams productions, it's easy to fall under the spell of the setup—it's "good"…until it's suddenly not.

10 Cloverfield Lane is cheapened by your constant awareness that it's building to some manner of shock ending. Although I'm not at liberty to discuss specifics, the inevitability of something (something epic, Tweet-worthy and OMG that fulfills all of the promise and nerdy excitement of the viral marketing) downgrades the modest pleasures of the movie's bulk to a steady buildup, as constant as the generator's hum throughout.

Like a classic Twilight Zone installment, 10 Cloverfield Lane is simultaneously tersely suspenseful and a bit cute in its cleverness, so much so that its climax, weirdly telegraphed by its marketing materials despite never appearing in them, is as satisfying as it is completely unnecessary.

If Steven Spielberg is the director without an id, his spiritual disciple, J. J. Abrams is following closely in his footsteps in dissipating virtually all the movie's symbolic power and metaphorical implications. "10 Cloverfield Lane" is about a captive woman, but it leaches the subject of its significance. Its oversimplifications are all the more unfortunate because the movie is a clever thriller, a starkly suspenseful—albeit sharply limited—pleasure.

Abrams has said his favorite kind of movie is one with a B story that's mounted on an A scale, but doesn't he see that that's the worst of all worlds? "A" films are rarely allowed to have the exhilarating, free-associational rough edges of a great B movie, and so a combination of the two often renders something that abounds in demographic-pandering polish. 10 Cloverfield Lane will almost immediately evaporate from the mind, before Abrams commences in selling you the same thing all over again.

[Winstead and Goodman's] battle of wills adds a substance to 10 Cloverfield Lane that the improvising ninnies of the original Cloverfield couldn't muster, despite its novel perspective on the monster movie. The gimmickry eventually arrives — and, god help us, the Cloverfield "mythology" — but by then, the film has succeeded thoroughly on its own terms.

The movie is a master class on narrative pacing and carefully managed jolts... Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, "10 Cloverfield Lane," though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.

All is not as it seems. Or maybe it is. That sums up the predictable unpredictability of 10 Cloverfield Lane, and a few moments of grisly grimness aside, the movie's modest pleasures emerge from its clever buildup of details.