THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN - Mark Reviews Movies

The Man in the White Van, Relativity Media

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | December 12, 2024

The Man in the White Van is supposedly based on a true story, but the screenplay by director Warren Skeels and Sharon Y. Cobb might as well have come from a template for any generic thriller. It's not an exciting or disturbing one, either, for reasons that are sometimes more unexpected than anything in the movie.

We could start with the story's odd structure, which begins in Florida in 1970 and jumps forward five years to a family living on a farm on the outskirts of a small town. The prologue lets us know one thing and one thing only: There's a killer on the loose.

Okay, it technically lets us know two things, with the other being that this murderer drives a white van. We follow a young woman leaving her job as a server at a diner, crying in the car over something or other while driving, and stopping to collect herself. The van pulls ahead of her, and then, the driver tries to wrestle her out of the car. She succeeds in struggling against the man but apparently forgets that cars have doors on both sides.

This doesn't bode well for the suspense sequences of the movie, which amount to additional flashes of women and girls being abducted and/or murdered, while a teenage girl in the 1975 story starts seeing the white van hanging around town and on the property of the farm. The structure here is especially odd, because the flash forward to the '75 story appears to have been afterthought on the part of the filmmakers.

It's not noticeable until the first instance of a flashback to those other killings, when Skeels presents the years, in a text that's visibly different from the title announcing that it's 1975, ticking forward in a somewhat nifty graphic. It's as if the screenplay had a lengthier prologue in mind, Skeels arranged for the animated title, and, after realizing that nothing much happens in the movie's present-tense narrative for a long while, the filmmakers decided to intercut those past killings into the course of the story. Since they already paid for the animated text, they might as well use it, even if it means that chronology of the transitions never lines up, right?

This little inconsistency is more amusing than an actual detriment to the movie, which has plenty of other issues. At the top of the list, perhaps, is the course of the main story itself, which follows farm girl Annie (Madison Wolfe) as she keeps seeing the van, keeps trying to tell people that she believes it and the driver are a threat, and keeps being told that she's exaggerating or fibbing. It's basically a story about crying wolf, with Annie's family—parents William (Sean Astin) and Hellen (Ali Larter), as well as older sister Margaret (Berc Bassinger) and younger brother Daniel (Gavin Warren)—serving as the doubters.

Skeels seems to think our knowledge of the van man's intentions is enough to generate suspense, because the whole thing becomes a string of scenes of a shadowy figure stalking Annie, only for the payoff to be a fake-out with a musical sting accompanying the false scare. It's repetitive and never frightening, obviously, and at a certain point, the family's skepticism becomes a tad unbelievable, considering how often Annie brings up the stalker in abject terror.

Surely, one of these characters might think the girl has a good reason to be living in constant fear (apart from how she forgets all of that when thinking about or interacting with her crush, played by Noah Lomax). Apparently, the mother is too fixated on getting rid of her daughter's horse for family conversations to be about much of anything else.

The other major issue is that, if this is legitimately based on a true story, it comes across as exploitative. Those past killings play out with no sense of who the victims are, apart from them being abducted/murdered. The killer himself is nothing but a shadow, suddenly taking his time with this one potential victim and serving as the unstoppable killer in a final showdown on the farm, where people survive mainly based on convenience or dumb luck. At that point, the movie really does become nothing more than a by-the-numbers thriller.

Wolfe is fine here as the girl who cries serial killer, and the '70s details are convincing and, for the most part, treated without irony (It is funny to watch young actors who may have never seen a rotary phone until showing up on set attempt to use one). Maybe a little humor or, well, anything might have added something of note to The Man in the White Van, but as it is, the movie is a dull attempt at cheap thrills.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products