By John Campbell
This is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen in some time. It begins with Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) arguing with somebody over the phone. We are unable to hear her words, for the audio is submerged beneath the unsettling soundtrack. Next we see her driving on a dark and lonely highway, and the car radio is reporting power outages in the area. The heavy portent reminded me of Janet Leigh’s fateful flight in Psycho.
Michelle has a prang – jarringly shot by director Dan Trachtenberg – and she wakes up chained to a pipe and wearing just her knickers and a singlet. The bare room is not in a neglected motel, but a bunker built by Howard (John Goodman), a sort of fat Norman Bates in a flanny. Howard is obviously not the full quid, but he insists that he has saved Michelle from the apocalypse outside. Can it be true? His hideaway is fitted with all mod-cons, including an air purifier and a jukebox that builds on the kinkiness by playing Tommy James’s Think We’re Alone Now.
Howard half-convinces Michelle and Emmett (John Gallagher Jr), another captive, that the event he has described has actually happened and when a crazed, blood-splattered woman comes bashing at the door it appears to them – and the audience – that his story must be fact. This is what keeps you on edge. Is there really a deadly nuclear cloud hovering outside? Or worse, mobs of alien invaders?
A bearded Goodman is frighteningly sincere as the former navy man with a paranoid mindset – and let’s face it, if the news is anything to go by, there are a hell of a lot of similar wackos armed to the teeth and fanging their pick-ups around America’s god-fearing Midwest. Winstead, whom I’ve not seen since the marvellous Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010), is the twenty-first century’s typical heroine, displaying in equal measure susceptibility and guile, tenderness and toughness. She is one resourceful chick and Michelle’s ultimate liberation arrives in a rip-roaring climax. I loved it.
