ATM (2012)

ATM arrives from 2012, a year when the American horror thriller still trusted a parking lot at night to supply sufficient dread. Three coworkers, a vestibule, a hooded figure in a parka, a dead car battery, a heater that can be switched off from outside. The premise is a vise, and the film knows it. What it asks of an audience is patience and a tolerance for characters who make poor decisions in freezing weather. Nothing more.

The mechanics are competent and the sociology is absent. David is a stockbroker, Emily is his love interest, Corey is the drunk friend, and the film treats all three as meat for the grinder. The hooded man has no stated grievance, no ideology, no backstory, and no interest in explaining himself. He shuts off the heat, blocks the door with a car, and floods the booth with cold water. This is a film about a man who wants people to freeze, and it commits to that premise with a narrowness that borders on the admirable. Race, gender, class, and the environment all pass through the frame without leaving a mark. The Christmas party exists to explain why nobody has a working phone.

The ending offers a frame-up, a crowd of identical parkas, and a killer already planning his next vestibule. It is a cynical closing note that would be unsettling if the preceding eighty minutes had earned it. They have not. The result is a lean, joyless exercise that will satisfy devotees of the trapped-in-a-box subgenre and no one else. On the cultural ledger it registers as a blank page. The film has no argument to make about the world it depicts, and it makes none. Twenty-six critics agreed on a twelve percent approval rating, which is a verdict more emphatic than anything the killer manages.