P2

Casts : Simon Reynolds, Wes Bentley, Rachel Nichols

It’s Christmas Eve, Angela Bridges, an ambitious young executive, works late before she leaves for her family’s holiday party. When she gets down to the parking garage, she discovers that her car won’t start. Her garage is deserted and her cell phone doesn’t get a signal underground. When Thomas, a friendly security guard, comes along and offers to help, Angela nervously accepts his gesture of good will. Soon after a failed attempt to start her car, he invites her to stay and share a small Christmas dinner he’s preparing in the parking office, but she laughs it off. Angela doesn’t realize this is no laughing matter. Thomas has been watching her closely–for months. His dinner invitation is not optional. If Angela wants to live to see Christmas morning, she must find a way to escape from level P2 of the parking garage.
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.

Once she has run a considerable distance away from Thomas, Angela manages to slide her legs through her handcuffed wrists so her arms are cuffed in the front of her body instead of the back.

While Thomas hides the evidence of Jim’s death, Angela rushes back to the office for her cell phone, and also steals some key cards. She finds phone signal near a gate on P1 and attempts to call for help, but drops the phone on the other side, when she sees that Thomas is rounding the corner, and has to leave it behind. She runs to the elevators with Thomas right behind, and enters with help from Thomas’s key-cards.She attempts to go to the lobby but the floor button is mysterously broken and winds up back on P1 nearly face to face with Thomas and Rocky (his dog) before taking refuge in an elevator shaft by using the emergency stop between floors. She uses the emergency button to call for help. On the line is a man with a heavy South Asian accent. She pleads for him to call 911 but the man tries to convince her Thomas was just trying to help her. Angela then understands the voice is really Thomas’s. He then begs her to come out of the elevator but she refuses. Thomas then forces her to leave by flushes her out by flooding the elevator with a fire hose from a higher floor.As the elevator floods a shadowy object falls from the ceiling later showing it is Karl’s persumly dead body.When the elevator finally reaches the next floor it bursts open spilling Angela and Karl into the hallway.Hoping that Karl still may be alive, She tries to awaken him but he wont arouse. Angela then realizes to save her own life she must leave him.(Karl is later seen still on the ground where Angela left him, but now there is a large gash in the side of his head,fresh and maybe evidence he was still alive in the flooded elevator.Thomas then blames him for ruining Christmas and leaves his body in the flooded hall)

Angela manages to escape into a shadowy corner of the garage to hide from Thomas, and in the meantime, he plays Elvis songs throughout the entire garage to torment her. Realizing he is keeping track of her with the security cameras, she breaks open an emergency fire axe and begins to destroy them while making her way to his office, prepared to fight. Once entering, she finds video playing of Thomas groping her breasts while she was drugged, and, blinded by her fury she smashes the TV with the emergency fire ax. Thomas then appears and ambushes Angela with a taser.

Meanwhile, two police men arrive at the garage and want to patrol the area for anything unusual.Through most of their patrol (unknowingly to them)Thomas has the fire axe,hiding it from view when he speaks to them through his office door, ready to use it. Especially when they come across the boards layed over Jim’s leftover blood splatter.They don’t check behind it or find anything suspicious about it. Angela soon awakens, realizing she is locked in the trunk of her vehicle. She breaks free and rushes to catch the police before they leave but to no avail, and instead, encounters Thomas and his attack dog at the door. He releases Rocky(the dog) on her, but she smashes the window of a Lincoln Towncar and hides inside. When the dog assaults her inside, she stabs it in the head repeatidly with the tire iron she used to escape from the trunk. Once the dog is dead Angela (now covered in blood) stumbles to a nearby rental car office and calls 911. Thomas soon comes after her, but she manages to spray him in the face with some sort of chemical, taking a handful of rental car keys, and driving away in one of them.

On her way to the exit, she is suddenly side-swiped by Thomas in another vehicle, leading up to a game of chicken in which Angela wins. However, in the heat of the chase, Angela flips the vehicle and is presumably knocked unconscious. Thomas opens the door to retrieve her, but having faked her injury, she stabs him in the eye with an envelope opener, chokes him with her handcuff chains, then uses his keys to unhancuff her self and then handcuff him to the wrecked car. Taking his taser, she goes to leave, until Thomas insults her but then notices she is about to ignite a stream of gasoline leaking from the car. He then pleads with her, “why can’t we just be friends?” When she doesn’t answer his pleas, he insults her by calling her the “C” word.Now, Angela has no mercy for Thomas so she quickly ignites the stream of gasoline, engulfing the car and Thomas in flames. She watches him burn and listens to his screams for a miniute, then turns around and leaves.

With Thomas dead, Angela limps(because of the dog biting her leg) out of the garage, onto the snowy streets of New York City, and towards the lights of several ambulences.