The Man in the White Van Review: Striking Thriller

Warren Skeels’ The Man in the White Van is a chilling horror-thriller film that blurs the lines between true crime and slasher horror.

She’s forced to face her stalker alone. Even Annie’s family don’t believe her stories about an anonymous stalker. While Skeels’ film has moments of gore, its humanising emphasis on its protagonist’s character growth is rarely seen in more voyeuristic true crime films.

The film opens in 1974. Annie is a teenage tomboy who is bored of her small town in rural Florida. She competes with her glamorous older sister Margaret (Brec Bassinger) and outspoken younger brother Daniel (Gavin Warren) for attention from her family. Her parents (Sean Astin and Ali Larter) despair of her ever fitting into the conservative life of their hometown. Parental despair about her attention-seeking grows when Annie starts seeing an anonymous white van around their hometown. The white van is at first irritating.  And then it becomes more sinister, lurking outside the family home when she is home alone.

Skeels doesn’t sketch out this stalker in much detail. An early shot in The Man With the White Van shows the titular white car on isolated stretches of road. Another shows the driver’s silhouette in the car under a suburban streetlight. Even when he ambushes Annie walking home after dark, he speeds off before she can confront him. Fleeting glimpses give the stalker eerie and almost non-human qualities in the mold of Michael Myers, the silent masked villain of John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween. These early scenes make you wonder whether Skeels’ choice to link the film to Mansfield’s real-life crimes is misjudged. There seems little point to refer to true crime in the film’s promotional material and then not offer any sense of his background or motives.

This thinly sketched villain is a vivid counterpoint to Skeels’ depiction of Annie in The Man in White Van. Her character arc is a compelling one and this focus on details of Annie’s life distinguishes the film from comparable thrillers. We learn a great deal about her life. She lives in the shadow of Margaret, her older sister. Skeels is able to subtly weave this domestic plotline into the central drama between Annie and her stalker. For instance, Annie and Margaret have frequent rows due to her jealousy over Margaret’s personal phone line into her bedroom. Without giving too many spoilers, this phone line becomes part of the build-up to a closing sequence when Annie finally meets her stalker face-to-face.

These snapshots of Annie’s homelife also offer a memorable way of exploring the psychological effects of a stalker. Skeels’ narrative of The Man in the White Van seems to work in reverse to other thriller films featuring stalkers or serial killers. By not focusing on the unique evil of the stalker, the film also avoids giving the killer too much attention and unintentionally glamorising them. Instead, we see her life gradually infiltrated by the stalker’s threat and the film chooses to focus on the slow torment of being a victim of one of these stalkers. 

This emphasis on victim psychology is a compelling quality of The Man in the White Van. Skeels’ finds ways to isolate Annie within the framing. She is framed alone within different settings – at home, at school, even in the crowded car with her family. The white van appears in the backdrop of all these solitary shots. This visual framing highlights Annie’s distance from her family and succeeds in heightening our uncertainty about when and how the confrontation will arrive.

Once they finally meet, The Man in the White Van turns into a more conventional horror thriller. The prolonged chase sequence wouldn’t look out of place in gorier slasher movies. Close-ups on Annie’s face emphasise her palpable dread. The screeching score underpins a sequence with tension that will hold a tight grip on the audience. However, by this climax, the film’s refreshing patience in outlining the sympathetic details of Annie’s life means we are much more invested in her survival than your average slasher horror.

Ultimately, The Man in the White Van blurs the boundaries between psychological thriller and true crime. It offers an unusually personal and sympathetic look at the psychological effects of stalking. The film also broadens expectations of formulaic crime-thrillers courtesy of Skeels’ claustrophobic direction and Madison Wolfe’s committed lead performance. Ultimately, The Man in the White Van is a haunting thriller to be recommended and remembered.

The Man in the White Van will be released in US theaters on December 13, 2024.