Trunk is a 2024 thriller that begins with a medical student locked in the back of a trunk, with no knowledge of how she got there.
Wikihow directions rarely work when you’re in the situation. Medical student Malina (Sina Martens) wakes up woozy, and separated from her fiancé, Enno (Artjom Gilz). Quickly catching her bearings, reality hits her. She’s locked inside of a trunk, with no idea of how she got there. Pain shoots into her side, and her legs are completely numb.
Miraculously, Malina has her cellphone. A link to the world outside of this dark and confined one is present. Starting with unhelpful Internet tips to escape this predicament, the abductee then calls the police, where she’s put in touch with local officer Elisa (Luise Helm). With no immediate sense of where she’s at, where she’s going, or what the car looks like, the police’s ability to assist is an extremely long shot. In the meantime, Malina will lean into her smarts to not only stay alive, but piece together this macabre mystery.
A great single-location thriller always feels like for whatever reason the most likely types of movies to come out of nowhere and surprise, whether in the box office or on streaming. I think it’s the scope; smaller, self-contained features in this genre can hit better than mid-sized and “large” ones and when done well, can put the viewer in the shoes of the lead character expeditiously and efficiently. That said, the course has to still be plotted well and the route can’t have too many barricades. Trunk has some functional features, but this is mostly a bumpy ride.
Trunk stands as the directing debut for Marc Schießer, who also produces, edits, and writes. Technically, Schießer gets a lot of mileage from his premise. His camerawork is never static even as at minimum, 90% of the movie is seen from the trunk and through the eyes of Malina, with various camera angles and speeds utilized to keep the terror in motion as long as possible. Clearly made on a sparse budget, Schießer shows quite the flair, and hopefully he’s given opportunities to create subsequent dynamic thrillers, action flickers, or possibly horror.
It’s not a given for every micro-sized film, but for some, when the film is so small, its plot machinations by proxy can box the film into a storytelling corner. Registering only six characters, by process of not exactly elimination and more so inference, it’s fairly easy to ID where the story reveals are coming from. Throw in a few contrivances (abductor puts abductee in a trunk yet is cool leaving the abductee with their well-charged phone?) and stiff dialogue from all but Martens, and its central theme of the powerless reclaiming their sense of self feels more manufactured than organic.
Martens carries much of this film, or at least as much as she’s able to. Both intentionally—and unintentionally, she performs as the only character who truly puts out the sense that she’s in a wild crisis with no clean solution, but still resourceful enough to buy herself more time to keep herself alive. It’s her supporting cast mates, Helm and Gilz that can’t quite keep up. Partly due to poor writing, and partly due to sounding so detached from the situation.
At least Trunk is a capable vehicle to display the directing flair of a debut filmmaker and its lead star, Martens. But it’s missing some important items in its emergency kit.