Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

Shadow in the Cloud opens with an animated Army Air Forces training short about gremlins, the mischievous sprites blamed for mechanical mishaps, and then spends eighty-odd minutes treating one as a literal winged monster. This is a film that knows exactly how silly it is and declines to apologize. A WAAF flight officer named Maude Garrett boards a B-17 in Auckland with a top secret valise, is shoved into the Sperry ball turret for takeoff, and is promptly dismissed, mocked, and cut off from the intercom by a crew of men who cannot conceive of a woman knowing an aircraft's silhouette. Then the gremlin arrives, and so do the Zero fighters, and the movie becomes a delirious pileup of creature feature, dogfight, and maternal melodrama.

The gender politics are not subtext. They are the text, stapled to the fuselage. Maude's credibility is stripped from her in increments, and her response is to seize the gun turret, drop the accent, and shoot down a Japanese fighter while the men gape. She takes command when the officers die. She climbs under the wing of a moving bomber to retrieve her infant. The closing credits run archival footage of real women who served in the British and American air forces, a gesture that asks us to read the pulp as tribute. The film's history is invented, a WASP smuggled into a combat crew that would not have had her, and it wears that invention as a badge.

Not everything coheres. The screenplay lurches from horror to farce to something approaching sincerity, and the sermonizing, such as it is, arrives mostly through sheer velocity of plot. Still, it is a strange, committed piece of work. A woman directs it, a woman carries it, and the men are largely furniture with opinions. There are worse ways to spend ninety minutes.