‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ is an irresistible thriller

The opening scene is like a silent movie.

With Bear McCreary’s ostentatious, menacing music soaring over the soundtrack — this is music that wants you to notice it — we see a young woman making a phone call (we don’t hear her voice), packing a bag and leaving her engagement ring and keys behind her.

Often with thrillers, as with horror movies, the openings grab us, so that by the time the genre kicks in and starts delivering thrills, all that thriller stuff feels like an intrusion.

[...] by making the whole opening without dialogue, the director sets the movie’s first minutes aside, as something apart.

By the opening credits, we’re intrigued, and when the credits end and we find our heroine chained up and living in a concrete bunker — well, we’re just appalled and enlisted for the duration.

Michelle has company in the bunker, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), who helped Howard build the underground hideaway, and from just those elements — three characters, living under the ground — the filmmakers spin a gripping 105 minutes.

The script is full of surprises, and Trachtenberg and the actors make a good screenplay even better, which is how things are supposed to work.

To this point in her career, Mary Elizabeth Winstead has been bobbing into and out of the radar, always distinctive, always better than the material, and always on the verge of becoming famous.

Much of what she does in the film is wordless — clocking Howard’s every utterance, gauging his lunacy, showing flickers of disappointment when she realizes Emmett is too dim to be much help — and she’s terrific.