Taglines: The only thing more terrifying than being alone is discovering that you’re not.
The story centers on a corporate climber Angela (Nichols) who gets stuck working late on Christmas Eve before leaving to attend a family holiday party. On her way into the parking garage (P2), she greets the main lobby security guard, Karl. She gets into the parking garage, only to discover that her car won’t start. After receiving some assistance (to no avail) from the security guard named Thomas (Bentley) and turning down his offer to spend Christmas with him, she calls for a taxi and waits in the lobby.
When the taxi arrives, she discovers she’s locked in the lobby and, with Karl nowhere to be found, quickly rushes back to the garage to find Thomas. The lights soon shut down and Angela wanders only guided by the light on her cell phone.She soon after trips dropping everything including her phone.After she retrieves it she shines it on herself revealing Thomas right behind her. Thomas assaults Angela, knocking her out with chloroform on a rag.
Later, Angela awakens in a drunken haze inside Thomas’s office, her ankle chained to the table, and Thomas presenting her with a Christmas dinner of turkey and mashed patatos. He is curious about her life and asks many questions about her past. Thomas mentions he is currently reading Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Thomas emplies that he loves Angela despite her many sins, the same way the novel’s main character loves his girlfriend. Despite Angela’s pleas and threats, Thomas continues to hold her there against her will, even forcing her to call her family and lie about an illness so that no one will come looking for her. Thomas decides to take Angela for a “drive,” and while he is unlocking her chains, she drives a fork into his back, but is unable to escape.
Handcuffing her wrists together behind her back, they climb into his car and drive down to P4. There, they find a fellow coworker, Jim (Akin), tied to an office chair. Jim once attempted to get physical with Angela in an elevator after having too much to drink at an office Christmas party, and having seen this on the security videos, Thomas presumed Angela wanted revenge.He tells her this is his present to her. When she refuses, Thomas explains that he has seen Jim touch more than just her and thinks it’s unfair that he should be relesed because he apologized.
When Angela tries to not only defend Jim but also herself, Thomas begins to believe Angela had deeper feelings for Jim than “just a co-worker” should have maybe even an affair to get a promotion. He changes his mind multiple times, whether he believed her or his own made up idea of how she feels about the married man.After arguing that Anglea should be the one to beat JIm, she gives in and says Yes, either thinking up a plan to run as soon as she’s untied or going along with Thomas so she doesn’t get hurt. But Thomas disagrees not wanting to make her a “bad person”.Instead Thomas beats Jim repeatedly with a flashlight and then rams Jim into the wall with his car multiple times, causing his intestines to rupture out of his body and ultimately killing him. Amidst the murder, Angela is able to escape from the car.
This is the backdrop for Summit Entertainment’s thriller “P2,” a suspenseful nail-biter exploring the fears of being trapped in a dark place and stalked by an obsessed voyeur. In the vein of suspenseful cat-and-mouse thrillers such as Wait Until Dark, “P2” takes the fear of the underground to a whole new level.
The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself
“Fear is made of contrast and finding new ways to express it – and not to repeat yourself,” said Alexandre Aja of the challenges inherent in crafting a convincing thriller. Working within the confines of a single set, an actual working underground parking garage, the cast and crew were required to shoot nights so the garage could operate normally during the day. Since the story takes place over the course of one night, the setting was realistic but posed challenges in making the location photogenic.
For Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, who made his debut as a Director of Photography on Aja’s “High Tension,” the lighting was key to achieving different levels of suspense. Alexandre recalled: “For the first time in my career, I was working in only one location for the whole show. Because we could only use different light levels to represent different levels of the garage, we broke down the script into three parts. The first part features bright lighting when Angela still feels safe. The second part is where Angela finds herself in complete darkness, except for safety lights. In the third part, after Angela has a big, pivotal scene with Thomas, the lighting level is somewhere in between the first two parts. The idea was to build the tension little by little without the audience noticing it.”
Production Designer Oleg Savytski was also tasked with transforming what essentially is a monochromatic environment into a silent character in the film. “Essentially, the lower you get, the darker it gets and the scarier it gets,” remarked Savytski. `P2′ has a very stylized story, but one that is set in a parking garage, so I came up with a color palette that was approved by the director, the DP and the producers. The Main challenge was to show the audience all four levels that are in the story when we could only shoot on a set that had two levels.”
Savytski continued, “I came up with a very earthy and organic palette for the film, descending in darkness and mood as the story descends deeper into the parking levels. I loved how the whole story was set in a parking garage, which is really a great setting for a psychological thriller.”
Bentley, who worked with Oleg Savytski on the indie comedy “Weirdsville” just prior to “P2,” was impressed by what the Production Designer managed to do with their aesthetically challenged location. “The set was amazing. It was dark and creepy and claustrophobic — everything scary you could think of about being trapped in a parking garage, but ten times worse,” Bentley remarked.
According to Erik Feig, one of the producers of “P2” and President of Worldwide Production and Acquisitions at Summit Entertainment, who spearheaded the development of the film and shepherded it through production, “This script was one of the most nail-biting I’d read in a long time and the movie jumps off the page. I was thrilled to work with Franck, who is a natural director, and to get the chance to collaborate with such promising talent as Alexandre Aja.”
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
P2 (2007)
Directed by: Franck Khalfoun
Starring: Grace Lynn Kung, Rachel Nichols, Simon Reynolds, Wes Bentley, Stephanie Moore, Miranda Edwards, Philip Williams, Franck Khalfoun, Arnold Pinnock, Bathsheba Garnett
Screenplay by: Alexandre Aja, Franck Khalfoun, Grégory Levasseur
Production Design by: Oleg M. Savytski
Cinematography by: Maxime Alexandre
Film Editing by: Patrick McMahon
Costume Design by: Ruth Secord
Set Decoration by: Liesl Deslauriers
Art Direction by: Andrew Hull
Music by: tomandandy
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence / gore, terror and language.
Distributed by: Summit Entertainment
Release Date: November 9, 2007
Visits: 105
