THE GIRL IN THE TRUNK (2024)

New On Demand and digital download from Sunrise Films!
Directed/Written by Jonas Kvist Jensen.
Starring Katharina Sporrer, Caspar Phillipson, Hother Bøndorff, Lianna Taylor, Lars Hammer Andersen
Check out the trailer here!!

In the opening moments of THE GIRL IN THE TRUNK, we witness a woman trying to drop off her rental car late after closing hours, only to find herself abducted by a man and put into…where else, the trunk of the car. Waking up later, the woman interacts with the man driving via her hacked phone and the mystery begins as to who this man is, why he is abducting the woman, and what is he going to do with her.

It’s quite a task to make a movie set almost entirely in the trunk of a car and while this film sort of accomplishes that task, with the lead, Manda (played by Katharina Sporrer) spending the bulk of the film trapped within this enclosed space and us as the audience in there with her, the experience didn’t work for me. Much of the film is made of long stretches of dialog that I found to be rather tedious. The plot goes from a simple premise to something surprisingly complex—overly complex at that. All of it adds up to being an overlong movie made from a small, short film concept.

The performances are decent. Sporrer was able to capture my interest and held it for a good long while. The man driving is also enigmatic and distant while seeming to know quite a lot of Manda and her current situation. There are a few well made scenes with Manda attempting an escape and failing a few times that actually work. All in all, there is a lot to like about THE GIRL IN THE TRUNK.

But still, I feel the concept is stretched way too far and the over the top ending really doesn’t match the tension laden tone the film was going for all the way through. THE GIRL IN THE TRUNK is a noble effort by director/writer Jonas Kvist Jensen, but it just isn’t able to make it as a full length feature. This one delivered a lot of padding via dialog, extended sequences of suspense, vague passages of time via unconsciousness, and long silences in order to make the runtime and all of that it was just too much filler to maintain my interest.