Review: P2 (2007)

P2 (2007)

Rated R for strong violence/gore, terror and language

Score: 2 out of 5

It didn't take long for me to discover where P2, a 2007 horror film about a woman trapped in an underground parking garage with a stalker, went wrong. It's a generally well-shot film, decently paced with a pair of solid if unspectacular lead performances, with a few great gory "money shots" as one would expect from a film co-written and produced by French shock-meister Alexandre Aja. Where it stumbles, however, is in the writing department, and specifically with the characters. This is a film about a cat-and-mouse fight for survival between two people who take up 90% of the film with their screen presence, and yet it never gave me a good reason to care about any of them. While there are some bits of development for the two in the first half of the film, hinting at an interesting, incisive, and (especially in this day and age) all too relevant direction that it could have gone in, after that it degenerates into a generic stalk-and-chase flick for another hour. Any bigger ideas it seemed to have get squandered, and the whole thing comes off feeling hollow.

The plot doesn't get much more complicated than what I laid out in my first sentence. Angela (Rachel Nichols) is a young, pretty office worker in Manhattan who, on Christmas Eve, gets trapped in her office complex's parking garage after hours when her car fails to start. It soon becomes apparent why it won't start, as the garage's security guard Thomas (Wes Bentley) chloroforms her and chains her up in his guard booth while swapping out her blouse and slacks for a revealing dress. Thomas' creepiness becomes apparent right off the bat, as the man turns out to be a walking "nice guy" stereotype who thinks that all the other men in the office are treating her wrong, whereas she really deserves somebody like him, who would make for such a great boyfriend. See, he even kidnapped a guy who groped her in the elevator, to show that he won't stand for other men abusing his girl! He never asked Angela about any of this before he kidnapped her and forced her to spend Christmas Eve with him, of course, but surely she'll understand that they're meant to be together.

When the film was focusing on Angela and Thomas' interaction early on, it worked. It wasn't great cinema, but it was deeply unnerving to watch at points. Rachel Nichols and especially Wes Bentley deliver good performances, the former playing Angela as a mostly vanilla "horror heroine" but doing it well and the latter playing Thomas as somebody who genuinely does not understand that any of what he's doing is wrong. The problem comes in that what we see of Angela and Thomas at the start of the film is what we get for the rest of it. Angela gets sexually harassed in the office and has to get to a family Christmas party tonight; Thomas wants Angela to be his girlfriend. We never learn anything else about either of them after that, the characters remaining flat and one-dimensional until the final reel. What is Angela's family life like? Why does she put up with sexual harassment at work? And the big one: why is Thomas so obsessed with Angela? All these and other questions about who these characters are go unanswered, and in a film as character-driven as this one, with Angela and Thomas being the only people of any real importance, this is a major problem. By the halfway point, I was just watching a woman getting chased by a killer.

A more engaging plot and characters might have helped the rest of this film stand out more. The direction by Franck Khalfoun is workmanlike, but doesn't go above and beyond outside of one especially grisly moment where Thomas rams a guy into a wall with his car, and even in that scene, it was more the surprisingly brutal gore effects that did the work. As Nichols and Bentley get little to do after their initial development, they settle into fairly rote "victim" and "stalker" roles that they never get a chance to break out of. The interest I had in their characters dissipated the longer the film went on, such that something that had my attention and made me feel genuinely uncomfortable in the first half had me forcing myself to pay attention by the end. The film never made the best use of either its parking garage geography or its Christmas time frame, with most of it coming across as surface dressing that leaves the film feeling like it could be set anywhere at any time of the year. Overall, it felt like a movie where the writers simply ran out of ideas about halfway through, and just coasted on autopilot to the ninety-minute mark and called it a day.

The Bottom Line

It had a first half that was honestly quite good, and looked like it was going to turn into something interesting, but it couldn't figure out how to keep itself interesting by developing the characters further and making better use of its premise beyond a generic stalker thriller. There's just too little to it for me to recommend.