Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the threat isn’t real. That’s the theme of this film.
The point is made by our visceral experience as much as by any analysis. The film is one fright, dread, shock, surprise, after another. We’re so exhausted at the end that we feel the emotional draining the Greeks expected of their tragedies — catharsis. We leave “calm of mind, all passion spent.” We feel the validation of paranoia as much as we read it in the film.
The reality of fear makes this a very contemporary work. The US election is propelled by fear and its exploiters. So are the major flashpoints in world politics.
Hence the main characters. Howard is a brilliant technician, up on science and construction, but madly driven by conspiracy theory and survivalism. On his sanity we go back and forth. Is his fear justified or is he inventing the apocalypse in order to control his two captives?
Michelle is the particularly contemporary hero: a newly independent woman who grows into asserting herself. In the opening scene she leaves her boyfriend Ben. The car crash ends her independence. When she awakens after the accident she — and we — expect her sexual enslavement. Is this Son of Room?
Instead she serves Howard's need for a daughter figure. For all his powers Howard is a figure of impotence, averse to sexuality. In their word-guessing game he only thinks of Michelle as a girl or a princess, not a woman. Unlike the earlier captive, the girl Howard abducted and finally killed, Michelle survives by turning Howard’s vat of acid against him. Later, when she fights off and destroys the vagina dentata monster from outer space, Michelle assumes the power and authority of the Sigourney Weaver heroine of Alien.
The fusion of earthly danger and sci-fi is especially significant here. When Michelle first breathes the safe outside air after her escape we share her relief — and her sense that she had been duped by Howard and his mad paranoia. For all his savvy he is a control freak and a lunatic.
The extra-terrestrial’s attack proves Howard’s mad theory was right after all. He’s still a control freak, conspiracy theorist and brilliant madman. But he’s defeated by the resourceful and newly assertive woman, who is the true hero for our times.
When Michelle and Emmett recall their regrets they both reveal their failure to have acted when they needed to. Emmett chickened out of going off to college on his track scholarship, resigning himself to a small life within a 40-mile radius. Michelle still feels guilty for not having interceded when she saw a man bully his little daughter (as her father had abused her). Seeing Howard kill Emmett hardens Michelle’s resolve not to fail to act this time.
Howard says he regrets nothing because he says he has done everything he wanted to. That denies his failure to have turned a captive girl into a daughter. But he has built that bunker and his fantasy proved right. Taken together, the trio represent the two good people who having once failed to act surrendered the field to evil — and they won’t do that now.
Michelle escapes and kills Howard, then blows up the alien. But for all her new found courage, strength and resourcefulness, her last decision poses a conundrum. On the radio she hears a call for survivors to come help out at the hospitals in Baton Rouge. Instead of heading there, though, she turns left toward Houston. Is she reverting to her earlier instinct not to get involved in others’ suffering or is she instead heading off to her new independence, to fight the invaders on her own?
That’s something to debate when we’ve recovered from this film’s emotional and frightful ride.
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