P2

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Have you ever had the unsettling feeling that you were being watched? Or perhaps felt the hairs on the back of your neck stand up on end? "P2" takes the uneasiness brought on by these situations to a whole new level, a clever pun I just had to steal from the DVD dust jacket, when a young woman finds herself trapped in a parking garage on Christmas Eve in a frightful fight for her life.

Rachel Nichols stars as Angela Bridges, a young workaholic businesswoman who would rather plug away on the keyboard of her computer instead of embracing the festive spirit by joining the rest of her co-workers at their annual office party. Buried in her work, the building slowly becomes deserted and by the time Angela notices the time, it puts her in a real tizzy when she remembers she still has to drive to her sister's for a family holiday get-together.

As fate would have it, Angela arrives at her car in the parking garage, but she turns the ignition and the car won't start. None of her associates are around to give her a lift, so the only option left is to call for a cab, and that's when a friendly security guard appears on the scene offering his services. Thomas (Wes Bentley) attempts to resolve her vehicular problem without any luck, and through casual conversation invites Angela to join him for a small Christmas dinner. Being already late as it is and just having met the guy, Angela respectfully declines, falling back on her original plan of heading outside to get the reception she needs so she can phone for a taxi. She learns the hard way that all of the exits are already securely locked down, and before she knows it, everything goes black.

Writer/director Franck Khalfoun does a masterful job at slowly building the tension leading up to Angela's abduction, and really kicks it into overdrive when she awakens into a horrific nightmare. It was bad enough discovering that all of her clothing had been replaced by a sexy white dress as she now sat at a table in Thomas' office, but the large chain wrapped around her ankle was what really clued her in to amplify the severity of the situation. Making matters worse, Angela observes that she is being served the holiday meal that she had previously turned down as if nothing strange had happened.

For the first half of the movie, Thomas maintains this "nice guy" façade, even after it has become perfectly clear to Angela that her captor has completely lost his marbles and she sticks it to him with the silverware. Thomas just shrugs the whole thing off and continues trying to impress his new flame, otherwise he'll have to go back to the same old stagnant nightly routine of staring at uneventful security monitors. Slowly, though, Thomas begins to show his true colors intensifying the suspense.

Angela is eventually freed from her leash when Thomas decides to take her on a trip to one of the lower parking levels where he has a surprise Christmas gift waiting for her. I won't spoil it here, but it's a vessel to introduce some pretty gruesome gore, and gives Angela the opening she needs to try and make a break for it. The only thing is, even with such an expansive set containing a wide array of places to hide, she still can't leave the premises, so it's only a matter of time before Thomas tracks her down in a cat-and-mouse game of survival.

I thought that the script was well written and primarily stayed clear from far-fetched elements, even though there were one or two Hollywood moments that might have stretched things a bit. Angela also slipped a couple of times using the plainly stupid "antagonize the psycho with insults" tactic seen in many of these types of thrillers, but for the most part she wasn't the typical dumb blonde doing idiotic things. Every move she made was for a valid reason, and I'm sure anyone caught in such stressful predicaments wouldn't always make ideally intelligent choices, either.

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