Turbulence, But Make It Narrative
There’s a moment in Shadow in the Cloud where Chloë Grace Moretz’s character Maude Garrett, hanging off a World War II bomber in midair, rides an explosion like it’s a trampoline and gets flung back into the plane. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d expect in a cartoon or a Fast & Furious sequel set in 1943, congrats: you are emotionally prepared for this movie in a way the script absolutely is not.
Billed as a WWII action-horror about a female flight officer trapped in a B-17 with a misogynist crew, a secret mission, and an actual gremlin, the film wants to be a feminist Twilight Zone with monster mayhem and pulpy thrills. What it mostly feels like is three different movies duct-taped together at cruising altitude:
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A claustrophobic thriller about a woman stuck in a ball turret.
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A creature feature with an ugly bat-goblin.
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A physics-free action cartoon that wandered in drunk during the third act.
The result isn’t so much fun-bad as it is “who approved this draft” bad.
Maude Garrett vs. The Airborne Bros Club
To be clear: Chloë Grace Moretz is doing everything humanly possible here. She’s committed, intense, and selling the hell out of some truly deranged material. For most of the film she’s alone in the Sperry ball turret under the bomber, separated from the all-male crew, arguing over the radio with a chorus of accents and red flags.
We get:
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Casual sexism.
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Graphic sexual comments.
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The general vibe of a toxic locker room at 10,000 feet.
The concept is actually solid: trap your heroine in a tiny rotating metal coffin with limited visibility and make all the tension come from what she hears, not what she sees. Paranoia, doubt, gaslighting, the works. For about 30 minutes, the movie almost pulls it off.
The problem is that the script tries to use “the men are jerks” as an all-purpose seasoning—toss in some misogyny, call it a theme, and hope nobody notices the plot makes less sense than the bomber’s flight path. These guys are such caricatures of sexist trash that they stop feeling like real obstacles and start feeling like bad improv: “Quick, you’re a 1940s creep, say something disgusting!”
The film keeps elbowing you: “See? Feminism!” while quietly ignoring that feminism deserves slightly better than a gremlin groping the fuselage.
The Gremlin: Discount Bat-Rat of the Skies
Let’s talk about the gremlin: the supposed horror centerpiece. It is… there. It has claws, big eyes, patchy fur, and the general aesthetic of a hairless raccoon that lost a fight with a lawnmower. It scrambles over the wing, tears at panels, menaces Maude in the turret, and occasionally looks like someone’s mid-tier Halloween animatronic escaped Spirit Store and joined the Air Force.
In theory, the gremlin is a neat throwback to old wartime folklore—those “little devils” airmen blamed for mechanical failures. In practice, the movie can’t decide if it wants the creature to be symbolic, scary, or just an annoyance. It pops in and out like a rude maintenance worker rather than a central horror presence.
The bigger scare is Maude being trapped, ignored, and disbelieved. The gremlin honestly feels like a side quest—an obstacle tossed in to justify calling this a horror film instead of what it mostly is: an airborne soap opera with bonus hull damage.
The Twist That Should’ve Stayed on the Ground
About halfway through, we discover what’s in Maude’s mysterious “top secret” cargo:
Not intel.
Not a weapon.
A baby.
Her baby. With one of the crewmen, Quaid.
This could have been an emotionally rich, morally messy twist—pregnant airwoman escaping an abusive husband, smuggling her child to safety, forced to confront the father in mid-flight. Instead, it plays like the script throwing up its hands and yelling, “Surprise! Feel things now!”
The tonal whiplash is wild. One minute the crew is roasting her over the radio like a flying frat house, the next they’re reacting to the baby reveal like they’ve stumbled into an after-school special. The film seems to think this instantly redeems everyone:
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Maude lied, but for noble reasons.
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Quaid is shocked, but vaguely supportive.
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The other guys are still creeps… but now they’re creeps near a baby, so they soften slightly.
It’s manipulative melodrama stapled onto a genre movie, and it doesn’t really deepen anything. The baby is mostly a prop—an excuse for Maude to do even more impossible stunts while clutching a wailing plot device.
Gravity? Never Heard of Her
Any goodwill generated by the early tension gets spectacularly exploded in the third act, when the movie fully abandons realism and sprints into full cartoon territory.
Highlights include:
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Maude falling out of the bomber and somehow using an explosion shockwave as a trampoline to fling herself back inside.
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Climbing along the underside of the wing, in heavy turbulence, to rescue the baby hanging from an engine like some kind of horrifying mobile.
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Crash-landing a B-17 in a way that kills some people but leaves Maude baby-cradling in the wreckage like she just hopped off a rollercoaster.
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The gremlin showing up again on the ground to wrestle with Maude in a muddy, almost slapstick showdown.
At this point, whatever atmosphere the film had built evaporates. The gremlin is no longer a nightmare; it’s Wile E. Coyote with better dental. The action is staged like the laws of physics submitted their resignation halfway through production.
If you’re here for pulpy, over-the-top nonsense, maybe this works as unintentional comedy. If you wanted a coherent horror-thriller, you’re trapped in the turret of bad script decisions, screaming silently.
Dialogue from a Very Loud Radio Play
Because Maude spends so much of the runtime stuck in the turret, the film leans heavily on radio chatter. That makes sense in theory; in practice, it means we’re listening to a bunch of shouty voices for long stretches, all with similar macho energy.
The dialogue oscillates between:
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“Women don’t belong here”
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“That’s not how planes work”
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“What if I made a gross sexual comment into a military headset during an active mission?”
It’s exhausting rather than revealing. You learn almost nothing specific about these guys beyond “they are stereotypes,” which makes it hard to care when the gremlin or enemy fighters start picking them off. They’re less characters and more meat with microphones.
Moretz, meanwhile, is acting her heart out to nothing but metal walls and a tiny window, which underlines just how lopsided this whole thing is. You’ve got a lead doing A-level work in a C-level script that occasionally remembers it’s about monsters.
A Midnight Madness Winner… Somehow
The movie famously won the People’s Choice Award for Midnight Madness at a major film festival, which suggests that either the competition was weak or everyone was very drunk and happy to see something loud and ridiculous after midnight. As a beer-and-popcorn, yell-at-the-screen experience, Shadow in the Cloud has its charms.
But that doesn’t make it good. It’s the kind of movie that keeps insisting it has something to say about misogyny and female agency while repeatedly undercutting itself with cartoon physics, clumsy twists, and a monster that looks like it should be yelling “GET OFF MY PLANE” in subtitles.
Final Approach: Brace for Disappointment
Shadow in the Cloud could have been great: a taut, 80-minute Twilight Zone episode about a woman no one believes, possibly hallucinating a gremlin while crammed into the worst seat on the plane, with her past closing in. Instead, it tries to be that and a creature feature and a wartime family melodrama and a Looney Tunes short.
What we get is a film that flirts with cleverness, settles for chaos, and trusts that Chloë Grace Moretz can carry all its bad decisions on her shoulders. She almost does. But even she can’t save a movie where the scariest thing isn’t the gremlin or the Japanese fighters—it’s the script jumping out of the cockpit without a parachute.
If you watch it, treat it like the gremlin: don’t take it too seriously, expect some damage, and be prepared to laugh at things that technically weren’t meant to be funny.
