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10 Cloverfield Lane: Everything Possible Must Happen

By Jacob Krueger

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Oftentimes, when we’re developing the story of a film, developing the plot of the film, we’re afraid that we’re going to run out of story, that we’re going to run out of the right story. We worry that we don’t have enough story, or a good enough story, that our idea doesn’t work, that we don’t have the right ending, that we don’t know what we’re building, and we get scared.

We start to look outside of ourselves for structure. We start to look outside of ourselves for plot. We start to look outside of ourselves to figure out what happens. Maybe we look at another movie. Maybe we look at a screenwriting book. Maybe we look at a hero’s journey archetype. Maybe, heavens forbid, we look at a software program that pretends it can tell us what happens in our story. Maybe we look to our friends for advice. But none of these places are where we really want to be looking.

Where we want to be looking is inside the content of the screenplay itself. We want to be looking inside of what we’ve already written to figure out where we need to go.

All of the answers for where we need to go in your story already exist in the initial pages of your screenplay. The structure of your movie can grow organically simply by looking at the things that exist in your story, and saying, “If this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true? And if this is true, what else must also be true?”

In this context, by the time we make it to the end of the movie, in some way, everything possible must happen…

Now, just a warning, there are major spoilers ahead.

What’s wonderful about 10 Cloverfield Lane is that we never know exactly what is true and what is not. In fact, we’re dropped directly into the experience of the main character.

The main character, Michelle, has just left her husband at the beginning of the movie. She is driving away down a road, something hits her car, and the next thing she knows she wakes up chained to a bed in an underground bunker with an IV in her arm, being nursed back to health by what seems like a totally deranged man, Howard (played by John Goodman). And Howard tells Michelle a bunch of really disturbing things, none of which seem like they could possibly be true.

Howard tells Michelle that the entire U.S. has been attacked. Howard tells Michelle that the air is so contaminated that it will rot your flesh right off the bone. Howard tells Michelle that it may be aliens that have attacked their country, that it may be mutant worms, that whatever these weapons are, they certainly aren’t American.

Howard seems to have a thousand crazy theories, and he does not seem mentally stable at all. He seems dangerous. After all, what kind of man rescues someone only to chain them to a bed? It seems a lot more likely, especially given Howard’s strangely aggressive habits and neuroses, that she’s been kidnapped and taken prisoner.

To try to prove that he is telling the truth, Howard takes Michelle up to the portal door of the air chamber, where he shows her two dead pigs through the window, insisting that they were killed by the poison gas. There might even be a small small part of Michelle at that moment that wonders if Howard might in fact be telling the truth.

But, a moment later, she sees the dent in his truck, flashes back to her car accident, and realizes that Howard did not, as he claimed, find her on the side of the road and save her.  He, in fact, was the person who ran her off the road in the first place.