The word of the moment to describe "Cloverfield" is "immediacy." The movie's style, told entirely by videotaped film from the POV of partygoers, echoes and brings up comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project." However, while "Blair Witch" fell down in storytelling and relied on audience belief that the story was real, "Cloverfield" picks up the thread that ties audience to characters, and puts us literally in the jaws of the beast.

The setup: a bit of text on the screen identifies this as a videotape found at a location "previously known as Central Park." We start out from Rob's POV, as he wakes up a woman named Beth. We see the beginning of their day together out at Coney Island, and the conceit of the film, that the tape is being taped over for Rob's party, allows us to catch glimpses of that day interspersed with the rest of the horror movie. (This is really effective. The moments of bright normalcy remind the audience of just how out of balance the later events are.) The tape moves into party plans and then to Rob's going-away party. We are introduced to rest of the main cast: Rob's brother Jason, Jason's fiancée Lily, Rob's best friend Hud, and Hud's unrequited love interest Marlena. Hud takes the camera, getting "testimonials" from the party guests and revealing Rob and Beth's big secret: they slept together a month ago, and Beth is at the party with someone new.

The setup goes slowly for a monster movie, but it does serve its purpose. Anyone who's been in that particular slice of twentysomething life recognizes these characters and empathizes with them.

And then the monster comes.

Popular horror gets spoofed and mocked because too many plot twists rely on characters doing dumb things. More, the camera acts as co-conspirator in the mockery, allowing the audience to take a third-person view of events and see more of the picture than the characters. It's very easy to think you would have ducked from the axe when you can see the murderer.

"Cloverfield" strips away the audience's smugness.

When people are running in terror, there isn't a magic eye showing the audience where to find a safe hidey-hole. There is no reaction time to incoming debris or flailing tentacles, there is just the sudden horror of watching your friend die. In its best moments, "Cloverfield" is more disaster flick than monster movie, and the audience is in the midst of the disaster without their "well, I would've done this" packed.

The movie offers several moments of self-reflection for the viewers. After the survivors are attacked in a subway tunnel, Hud thanks Marlena for coming back and saving his life. Marlena (who has been bitten by a monster and will die gruesomely from it) asks him if he thought she was the kind of person who wouldn't come back. And again, everyone watching is forced to wonder if he or she would have gone back. It's one thing to watch Rob's crazy rescue mission and think you would have opted for escaping the city, but stuck in the dark with killer monsters, would you save a guy you barely know, or would you run for it?

The friends I went to see the movie with said later that they probably wouldn't go see it again, and that does put a finger on the one place where the storytelling technique will hurt repeat business. The immediacy of the film, and the tease at the very beginning that the tape was "found," ensures we don't know what's going to happen to any of the characters until it does. (Standard beats aside – this is not a groundbreaking film in terms of guessing who dies.) But, once those fates have been revealed, rewatching the movie would feel like, yeah, watching someone else's home movie over and over.

"Cloverfield" is not for the easily nauseous, and it's not especially scary for those looking for a good fright. The limited POV doesn't allow for much anticipation, which is half the fun of getting scared. But "Cloverfield" isn't about the scare, it's about how people react in a crazy, desperate situation, and it turns out they react crazily and desperately and a bit heroically.

"Cloverfield"
Written by: Drew Goddard
Directed by: Matt Reeves
Running Time: 84 min
Rated: PG-13