- Directed by Gregory Jacobs
- Written by Joe Gangemi, Steven Katz
- Stars Emily Blunt, Ashton Holmes, Martin Donovan
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5k4a39lhWQ
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It starts out strong, stalls in the middle, and has a stronger finish that almost but not quite makes up for the slow center of the movie. It’s cold and sad and pretty grim. If you’re a fan of ghost stories, you may want to check this one out, but it’s not one of the best we’ve seen. An interesting touch was that none of the characters have names.
Synopsis
A girl gets out of class after a test and walks to the rideshare bulletin board. She sees a note asking, “Anyone need a ride to Delaware on 12/23?” She takes a number and calls them. On December 23rd, she meets the guy at his car for the ride. His trunk is full of stuff. He says he was just thrown out of his apartment. The windows don’t close properly and the door often sticks.
They drive down the highway through the snow; it’ll be at least another five hours. After a while, they start to talk, but it’s awkward. He seems to know a lot more about her than she would have expected, just over the line into creepiness. They stop at a gas station so she can pee, and she can’t get the door open to get out. She gets a little panicky until she gets the door open all on her own.
He turns off the road, wanting to take a shortcut, but she doesn’t like it. She’s also figured out he’s not really from Delaware, and he’s creeped her out. It starts to get dark. Before long, they run off the road and hit a tree, knocking them both out. She wakes up first and tries to call 911, but there’s no signal. They can’t find the other car’s tire tracks. It looks like they were alone on the road, but they both saw the other car coming right at them.
She blames him for driving her out in the wilderness and crashing. She thinks this was some kind of scheme to get her alone. She thinks he lied about everything. It’s all very paranoid.
He starts walking for help, and she tries to duct tape the broken window shut as the temperature plummets. She sees something moving outside; did he go for help, or come back? Or is this someone else entirely? She runs out after the person, who doesn’t respond.
The guy comes back; the gas station was closed. She doesn’t really believe him but doesn’t have much choice but to get into the car with him. They notice their watch and car clock stopped during the crash. He admits he did put up that sign just to be with her for a few hours. His intentions were innocent and sincere, but he used stalker tactics to arrange their ride together.
They look under the car and see that the gas tank has a leak; it’s empty now. She gets out to pee again and this time sees several people walking around out there. The two chase after the men, but can’t find them. The guy starts coughing blood, which is never good. He finds and explores an old, ruined house; it’s full of frozen corpses.
Meanwhile, back at the car, she sees several walking dead men. One of them spits out a snake at her. When she touches him, he burns a hole through her mitten.
A cop comes to the window, and he wants money. The guy whacks him with a crowbar, and they both suddenly are back in the car, only his hand is frozen to the crowbar and frostbitten. They battle the cold for a while. She reads an old newspaper article about a highway patrolman and two others who were killed on this spot fifty years ago. We get a flashback/vision to the patrolman pulling a woman out of her car and manhandling her as a bunch of retired priests watch.
She finds that the guy has been peeing blood. He’s had internal injuries since the crash, but didn’t want to scare her. She finds an old telephone and wants to climb up onto a phone pole and jack in to call for help. She climbs up the pole and breaks the box open. She plugs in her phone and gets a dial tone. She calls 911, but it’s a bad connection. For some reason, she doesn’t try to call back.
When she comes down from the pole, she finds a dead woman waiting for her. She runs back to the car, and the guy inside is dead.
A snowplow truck drives up and takes her away, along with the guy’s body. The driver tells her about the bad cop in the 50s who killed some people. Several people had frozen to death in that very spot over the years. Then in 1961 a bunch of priests were found frozen to death in their beds up on the hill. A car appears out of nowhere and drives them off the road; they roll over.
The driver goes out to help the other car, and sees that it’s a 1950’s police car. The car starts to burn, and a bunch of priests come down and pull out his radio. They watch as the cop burns to death. He jumps out of the car and touches the snowplow driver, who freezes solid on the spot.
The girl wakes up in the car next to the dead guy. The sun has come up. She sees the guy walking off into the woods; he’s one of the ghosts now. She staggers off into the woods and eventually finds the gas station, where she gets help.
Commentary
I found this incredibly boring. It was all going well until the car crash, where the film literally and metaphorically comes to a screeching halt.
I don’t care how innocent and nice he actually was, the guy arranging all that stuff to get her to ride with him was a stalker and more than a little creepy. The story about the cop, the priests, and the others isn’t told until the very end. It might have been more effective if we had known more about what was going on earlier in the film.
Overall, it’s dark, moody, and very cold. It was too little, too late by the end, and I found it tediously slow at times.