Even before its box-office-busting opening weekend in the US, this JJ Abrams-produced ‘film with no name’ had become a monster movie in more senses than one, creating a level of Internet-fed anticipation reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project a few years back. The similarities don’t end there; Cloverfield too is a terrifying ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’, an artfully constructed bit of pseudo-verité (with a no-name cast) masquerading as a found object, a personal testament retrieved from the ashes of a devastated city. (Without giving anything away, the interesting question of who found it is answered in the film’s opening frame; but this only raises further questions about the events we then watch unfolding…)

Starting abruptly, without music or opening titles, the film creates the illusion of being a camcorder video playing out in real time; it begins as a record of a farewell loft-party, introducing us to the group of friends whose lives will shortly be turned upside down, and then – when what appears at first to be an earthquake shakes the shindig – becomes a document of the destruction of Manhattan by an awesomely huge monster: skyscrapers collapse, the Brooklyn Bridge is torn apart, crowds of terrified New Yorkers run in panic through the streets, and the army attempts to combat the hulking menace with all the hardware at its disposal. Where Cloverfield departs from the BWP template is in presenting undeniably real – if resolutely unexplained – events through its dizzying rush of hand-held images, and thus plunging the audience into the very midst of the on-screen chaos. Technically, this is a brilliant achievement, and the melding of state-of-the-art special effects with a shaky camcorder æsthetic delivers a visceral immediacy that makes Spielberg’s alien attack in War of the Worlds look both staid and staged.

9/11, of course, hangs over the movie like a cloud of smoke over Ground Zero – the image of the Statue of Liberty’s head bouncing down a Manhattan street is memorable, if unsubtle – but the complete lack of exposition or explanation dictated by the film’s strict adherence to its limited point-of-view means it has the wider power of an existential nightmare in which sudden and inexplicable destruction is meted out for no knowable reason. Cloverfield strips the monster movie down to its bare essentials – we know that the head-scratching scientists and clench-jawed generals are out there somewhere trying to find a solution to the crisis, but such stuff exists not on screen but only in the kinds of ellipses that riddle the film’s elegant structure – and delivers something that Hitchcock might have described as pure cinema: showing, not telling, and taking the audience on a roller-coaster ride to the end of the world.

There are flaws, of course. Showing, rather than telling, is a method that always threatens to come unstuck when the monster itself has to be revealed. Cloverfield tries to skirt the issue for as long as possible, but its wise, Alien-like refusal to give us a full and clear view of its monster is nearly undermined by a Night of the Demon-style money-shot towards the end. And the other problem, of course, is the credulity-stretching nature of the film’s central conceit – that this is not a carefully constructed narrative but a spontaneous, unedited record of extraordinary events akin to the mobile phone movies that, these days, turn up on TV news reports of disaster. Mostly, it works, but you can’t help but ask yourself from time to time whether anyone would really hang on to a camera while New York came crashing down around them. The film’s director described Cloverfield as a “monster movie for the YouTube generation”; given that generation’s obsessive desire to document and share every moment of their lives, perhaps someone would…