While She Was Out (2008)

It's not hard to see why this thriller was forgotten despite starring Kim Basinger as a suburban housewife being hunted by murderers in the woods on a rainy Christmas Eve in what could have been sold as an R-rated, feminist response to Home Alone, had the movie been good enough to capitalize on any of that. The last few minutes, for what it's worth, are actually pretty good and provide something of an demonstration of what the movie as a whole was going for. This wants to be a sort of modern parable, meant to be experienced viscerally, rather than considered rationally. If it were being made today, the last decade of horror would offer a template for managing this effect. Unfortunately, it was made in 2008, and as such mostly leverages the cinematic language of suspense from that era.

The story here is bare bones. Della is a housewife with two kids she loves, an abusive husband she does not, and an immense amount of anxiety and regret. After a harrowing encounter with said husband, she heads out on Christmas Eve to pick up some last-minute things at the mall. While there, she antagonizes four young men by leaving a note on their car, which is taking up two spaces in the crowded parking lot.

They follow her back to her car in the now empty lot (more on this later). A security guard shows up and attempts to intervene, but the leader of the group shoots him in the head. Della gets in her car and flees, but the men pursue her to a construction site. Both her and the men crash their vehicles. She grabs a roadside emergency kit before fleeing her vehicle, and the bulk of what's left is a cat-and-mouse game. She runs away and hides, and they try and find her. Of course, this is the action movie/reverse slasher formula, so whenever they split up, the one who actually does catch up with Della is brutally killed by the woman acting in self defense.

Eventually it's just her and the last man, who's become smitten with her. She uses this to lure him close, kisses him, pretends she wants to sleep with him, then pulls out a flare. She burns him, gets his gun, and kills him before making her way home, where she checks on her kids then pulls the gun on her husband, who's too self-centered to even realize she's wounded, her clothes are torn, and she's covered in dirt.

That's the ending. The last shot and one-liner is meant to give the impression she's going to pull the trigger, though you could interpret it as her using the gun to make a point. Ultimately, though, you're not supposed to be thinking about it, at all. You're not supposed to worry about the fact a gunshot would wake and traumatize the kids Della spent the movie trying to return to, nor are you supposed to be concerned about the police. The moment is meant to elicit an emotional reaction in which you're relieved and excited to see Della break out of the shackles of civilized life that she's trapped in, symbolized by the gate blocking access to her community. It should be noted, the last of the men hunting her saw this in her. Before she killed him, he described her in these terms and asked her to run away with him (it doesn't matter whether he was sincere or not).

In case anyone watching missed the "Call of the Wild," it's all laid out pretty directly in the opening credits, which revolve around Della's kids' drawing, including some foreshadowing the woods and stream where the action takes place. Instead of men, the kids have drawn wolves, which... okay, this wasn't going for subtlety.

All of that makes for an interesting blueprint, but - as I said at the outset - the movie doesn't pull it together. There were a few ways this could have gone with the idea to make it work: either it could have leaned into the larger-than-life tone the way Mandy would a decade later, or it could have played the bulk of the movie like a serious, realistic thriller to pull the audience in before playing the cathartic ending as a twist.

It attempts the latter but fumbles for a couple reasons. The more forgivable of which is that the dialogue seems as if it's written for the other approach. The husband isn't subtly manipulative or complex: he's a lumbering oaf who puts his fist through the wall after screaming at his wife about the house being a mess. The minor annoyances Della confronts at the mall are silly cliches. If the movie were painting with broader strokes, this would all be fine, but instead of setting up the shift at the end, it feels like bad writing in the moment.

The larger problem is that the cinematography and fight choreography aren't anywhere near where they need to be to make the extended chase sequence (which, again, is most of the runtime) feel intense or frightening. For the most part, this looks like the action you'd expect from a middle-of-the-road TV series from the same era until it drops in gore effects, which....

Okay, here's the thing. These are technically well executed, gross kills. Only they're so out of place tonally, they feel kind of silly in context. These are the sort of exaggerated shots you'd expect from a slasher movie - they're not believable, so they kill the tension rather than add to it.

Basinger delivers a solid performance, but it's so chopped up and reliant on cheesy writing as to render it mostly a moot point (at least until the end, when the movie briefly pulls itself together). The movie needs to feel evocative and dreamlike, so you're not asking questions about why the setting doesn't make sense. It needs you not to be thinking about how a mall parking lot went from packed to leaving Della completely isolated in the time it took her to buy some wrapping paper, a cup of tea, and do some window shopping. It's attempting to pull off a slight-of-hand magic trick but forgetting to incorporate the necessary misdirection.

But enough about all that - let's talk about Christmas.

This isn't a unique case as far as its utilization of the holidays are concerned, but it's an interesting one with some neat connections. For the most part, While She Was Out treats Christmas as a sort of background element with a sinister purpose. I mentioned Della's gated community earlier, which symbolized a sort of false security (there's even a line of dialogue spelling this out). Christmas serves the same purpose: in the world of the film, it's an artificial construct providing the illusion of civilization and protection. Reality is savage and exists outside of this construct (though some generic creepy Christmas music played over the opening credits muddles this a bit).

The two main references the movie appears to be pointing at are First Blood and The Night of the Hunter. First Blood, in particular, uses the opposing worlds of nature and a decorated town as stand-ins for the dichotomy between civilization and humanity's inner savagery. The Night of the Hunter is doing something different with the interplay between civilization and the wilderness, but some of While She Was Out's depiction of the stream feels like a callback to the classic noir horror (perhaps an ill-advised one, as comparisons between the two don't do this any favors).

One holiday-adjacent theme worth highlighting is the way this references religion. At one point, Della stands in a stream and calls on God to help her until she finally realizes she's on her own. This scene, like most of the movie, is awkwardly written and shot, but I really like the underlying idea. The movie is linking religion and faith in with elements of civilization offering false comfort. Here, God is just presented as another gate accomplishing nothing. There's a hint of atheism in the movie, which places it in a small subset of holiday films embracing (or at least hinting at) that worldview.

This isn't the worst movie of its type out there, but there aren't a lot of reasons to bother tracking this down. First (and to date last) time director Susan Montford is trying to do something interesting here, but for the most part it doesn't work. That said, the atheism angle provides a bit of novelty, and the last few minutes are fun. That's nowhere near enough to justify a recommendation, but it might save this from being a total loss.