Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jonas Kvist Jensen, Screenplay – Martin Mortensen Søe, Producers – Morten Hjorth, Jim Pedersen & Jannick Raunow, Photography – Tobias Bendixen, Music – Jonas Frederik. Production Company – LoneTower Visuals/A Bigger Boat/Raunow Productions.
Cast
Katharine Sporrer (Amanda Jennings), Caspar Phillipson (Michael Bellerose), Høther Bondorff (Stephen Jennings), Christopher De Courcy-Ireland (Voice of Stephen Jennings), Lianna Taylor (Deputy Sheriff Terri), Lars Hammer Andersen (Bill the Hunter), Danny Thykær (Voice of Danny the Hunter), Adam Kitchen (Voice of John)
Plot
In Dallas, Texas, Amanda Jennings goes to drop a car back off at the rental agency. She has fled from her own wedding, unable to handle the pressures from other people. She finds the agency is closed and she gets back in the car only to be chloroformed. She comes around locked in the trunk. She tries to call 911 but the call is intercepted by her abductor. As he drives, she tries to find out what he wants. As Amanda tries to affect a means of escape, he torments her by tossing scorpions and snakes into the trunk with her.
The Girl in the Trunk came out seven months after the German-made Trunk (2023), which had a near-identical premise of a girl abducted and locked in the trunk of a car where the camera stays there with her as she tries to make an escape and her only contact with the outside world is via her cellphone. Around the same time, there was also the South Korean-made tv series The Trunk (2024) but that is a regular drama and unrelated in theme to any of these. Ten months later, there was also Locked (2025) in which Bill Skarsgård is trapped inside an SUV.
While Trunk and The Girl in the Trunk tell essentially the same stories, there are noted differences between the two. Here, for example, the trunk is much more roomy – enough space for Katharine Sporrer to kneel and turn around within the confines, whereas in Trunk Sina Martens was far more believably unable to turn. Of the two films, The Girl in the Trunk is definitely the inferior. Certainly, director Jonas Kvist Jensen gets some reasonable tension out of one scene where a scorpion is thrown into the trunk with Katharine Sporrer. However, a later scene where a snake is also thrown in fails to hold the same impact for the simple reason that we get Katharine’s natural fear and then the drama is distracted by other things happening and the snake simply gets forgotten about until it is returned to several scenes later.
The Girl in the Trunk is a Danish-made film. Jonas Kvist Jensen has made the choice to locate the film in Texas (no doubt for the purpose of tapping the American market), although the film itself was shot in Denmark. This does unfortunately end with Danish actors trying to affect American (Southern) accents and just not quite doing a fully convincing job – I kept trying to work out what felt off about the way they were talking for some way in until I looked up where the actors came from.
There are also some stupid pieces of plotting – like when Katharine Sporrer is in the trunk and can see a police officer outside but fails to do anything to attract attention. Or scenes that belong more in the improbable realms of an action movie with the villain getting up again after a direct bullet shot point blank to the head, or the father getting into his helicopter and using it to ram the car (that also has his daughter inside it) with one of its landing skids.
The most ridiculous part though is the ending where [PLOT SPOILERS] the deputy volunteers to drive Katharine Sporrer back while leaving the kidnapper locked in the trunk and saying she will leave him for backup to get. It feels a ridiculous level of professional incompetence for a police officer in a major kidnapping incident to leave the key suspect behind without even arresting them or making sure they are properly in custody, at the very least without even someone left to guard them. It is a case of the filmmakers having made no effort to actually research basic police procedure.
The Girl in the Trunk comes from Jonas Kvist Jensen who had made about three other full-length films that do not appear to have been widely seen.
Trailer here