Shadow in the Cloud is an action-horror movie that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, and it was released to the general public on January 1, 2021 via VOD. It takes place during World War 2, and it stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Maude Garrett, a woman who hops on a military plane at the last minute with orders to protect a top-secret package. The crew is suspicious of both her and the package, so they force her to stay in a small, one-person compartment on the underside of the plane where she can only communicate with them through an intercom system. Soon afterwards, she sees a gremlin crawling on one of the wings, and as you can probably guess, the creature makes things very difficult for everybody on board.
This movie is about 80 minutes long, and for the first hour or so, I was really liking it. Since Maude is in a small compartment by herself, this first part is essentially a one-woman show, and Chloe Grace Moretz absolutely nails it. She's the best part of the movie overall, and in this first hour, she carries it almost entirely by herself. I say almost entirely because the crewmen did their part too. Even though they're just voices on an intercom, they feel like real people. None of them are particularly unique or memorable on their own, but they somehow come together to form a whole that's much better than just the sum of its parts. What's more, the mystery of the package is pretty intriguing as well. The movie really makes you want to know what's in there, and it had my mind racing with all the cool things I thought it could've been.
And then we have the gremlin. The film introduces it at a good pace, initially giving you little glimpses of the monster and then letting you see it more and more as time goes on, and once you see it in all its glory, it's way different from the cute little creatures you remember from the 80s. This is a grotesque, rat-like monster that looks like it can and will rip your face off the first chance it gets, and I really liked it.
But then the movie changes. At about the one hour mark, it tells you what's in the package, and I found that revelation really underwhelming. I obviously don't want to spoil it, so I'll simply say this: it feels like a lame attempt to give Maude some more emotional depth, and it just takes time away from the elements of the movie that actually work. What's more, the film also becomes a lot more action-heavy at this point, and surprisingly, that just makes it worse. The little bits and pieces of action we get during the first hour are really good, but in these last twenty minutes or so, the quality drops dramatically.
The biggest problem with the action in the third act is that most of it centers around a group of Japanese fighter planes that come out of nowhere, and the gremlin is pretty much relegated to a side role. The creature just makes it more difficult for the characters to fend off these random attackers, so it feels like the filmmakers simply shoehorned it into a story that originally had no horror at all. The first hour does a really good job of setting this monster up as the main threat, and it's a huge bummer to see the movie switch gears and completely botch the payoff.
All in all, I actually liked the majority of this movie. Like I said, the first hour is really good, so the part I didn't like was only twenty minutes. The problem is that it was the last twenty minutes, which is arguably the most important part. Movies need to stick the landing, and if they don't, then they leave you with a bad taste in your mouth that can sometimes outweigh all the good they did up until then. And that was the case with this movie. I wish that the first hour could've outweighed the third act, but it didn't. For me, those last twenty minutes just ruined all the good they did in the previous sixty, so I have to say that I wouldn't recommend Shadow in the Cloud. Instead, you should just catch up on some 2020 films that you might've missed (like maybe a few of these) to pass the time before the first good movie of this new year comes out.
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