Shadows and Light Entertainment

I had Shadow in the Cloud (2021) on the queue, but once the How Did This Get Made podcast did an episode, I wanted to see it immediately. Annoyingly, Netflix kept sending DVDs off of the Wait list instead. But they got around to it. It's a good thing I waited, because the spoilers would have spoiled it. By the way: SPOILERS!

It starts very promisingly. It's WWII, and we get to watch a Sad Sack style animation about "gremlins", the little monsters that airmen blame for things going wrong. The movie in the movie explains that this is a cheap excuse. There are no gremlins! Hm.

A woman (Chloe Grace Moretz), dressed in a uniform with a few bandages and carrying a large leather radio bag, gets on a bomber. Although the crew jeers and insults her, she keeps military, hands over her orders and lets them know that the radio bag is confidential, and must not be opened. To get her out of the way, and as a hazing, they stuff her into the "sperry", the ball turret for the belly gunner. She leaves the package with one of the men, as there is no room.

For the next 20 minutes or so, I thought I had figured out what the movie was going to be. Moretz is stuck in the sperry, talking to the crew over comms. When she talks, she gets their identities and the movie shows them against a dark background. So we figure the rest of the movie will sort of be Moretz solo, in a tight space, acting against just voices.

Then she starts to see "shadows in the clouds" - and soon actual gremlins: human-sized rat/bats who are disassembling the engines. She tries to tell the crew without seeming to be crazy. She's terrified, but doesn't seem to be too surprised. So I figure that her secret mission is about these creatures, and the radio bag is  proof of their existence, or maybe an anti-gremlin weapon. 

But no! I'll skip to the act II spoiler reveal. The radio bag contains her baby. She is married to an abusive soldier, and she join the Women's Air Corps to get away. In the meantime, she had a baby with another man, and then her husband found her. Hence the bandages. She just needed to get out of New Zealand and grabbed the first plane that came along on forged orders. Oh yes, and the father of the baby is one of the (kind of anonymous) crew.

By now, the gremlins (remember the gremlins?) have made themselves known to the crew. In fact, one has stolen the baby bag and is playing with it out on the wing. So Moretz leaves the gun turrent, and makes her way across the underside to the plane (the one that's flying, right?) to hook the kid with a piece of busted tubing. They can't be flying very fast, because her hair is barely ruffled. 

So now there are four movies going on: the story of a woman in a man's war, the adultery and baby story, the wartime aviation adventure, with Japanese Zeros and mechanical problems. And then there's the gremlins. Personally, I liked the movie I thought I was watching at the start, before the baby showed up. I also wouldn't have minded if the action hadn't been quite so absurd. 

This was directed by New Zealander Roseanne Liang, who co-wrote the script with disgraced-but-still-working-I-guess Max Landis. I'd like to assign the ridiculous stuff to him, and the more sensitive early work to her, but who knows? 

The ending is suitably ridiculous and triumphant - so we left on a high note that didn't quite erase the overwhelming WTF feeling the movie inspired. The How Did This Get Made crew were equally gobsmacked. The intern who chose it says it is both the worst and her favorite movie of 2021.