Two (2021)
Man and Woman Wake Up Surgically Attached
A Spanish film with a wonderfully ick and queasy premise where a man and a woman wake up in bed together to find they have been surgically attached at the waist
Imprisonment Thrillers
This refers to thrillers where someone is held prisoner by a captor. The drama of the story centers around their attempts to escape from confinement, where suspense rides a rollercoaster around the building up of hopes and seeing them dashed.
There have been a number of films about people imprisoned by psychos, serial killers and backwoods hicks. A popular variant came during the Torture Porn fad where people were imprisoned in locked rooms and forced to participate in cruel and sadistic games.
Of more recent has been the Conceptual Containment Thriller, which seeks to confine a person or persons in as small a place as possible – a coffin, an elevator, a tree, a tent, a phone booth – for the duration of the show.
The topic is discussed in more depth in the essay Imprisonment Thrillers
200 Degrees (2017)
Man Locked in a Room as the Temperature is Turned Up
A thriller in the vein of films such as Phone Booth and especially Buried with Eric Balfour locked in a room in a warehouse with heat lamps that are slowly turning the temperature up to the title level. This ratchets suspense well, Balfour is good but things fall apart at the denouement
247°F (2011)
Characters Trapped Inside a Sauna
In the vein of films like Phone Booth and Buried, a Conceptual Containment Thriller with a group of people trapped in a sauna with the heat being turned up. From the director who later made Landmine Goes Click in this same vein
Unseen (2023)
Blind Woman Flees Through the Woods
A film with an ingenious premise where a nearly blind woman must rely on a total stranger to guide her by her phone through the woods while avoiding a pursuer
V/H/S/Beyond (2024)
Anthology of Found Footage Horror Tales
Seventh of the V/H/S Found Footage horror anthologies, this is one of the best with a number of the episodes venturing into SF and others that feature some genuinely outlandish moments
Vile (2011)
Sadism and Torture
I’m tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting
Villains (2019)
Criminals on the Run Imprisoned by Psychos Comedy
A film with a wonderfully eccentric and offbeat sense of humour where Bill Skarsgård and Maika Monroe are inept criminals fleeing after a robbery who end up prisoners of a psychopathic couple
Vivarium (2019)
Couple Trapped in a Strange Suburb
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can’t leave. Then things start to get really strange.
We Need to Do Something (2021)
Family Trapped in a Bathroom During a Mysterious Catastrophe
A horror film made as an allegory for Covid with a family trapped inside a bathroom without supplies as a mysterious catastrophe happens outside their door
The Woman (2011)
Uncivilised Wild Woman/Sadism and Brutality
Lucky McKee’s highly controversial film about a family man who makes a feral woman prisoner is out-there, takes-no-prisoners horror. Forget the kneejerk reactions, this is brutal, highly original and with a whiplash sense of dark humour
The Womb (2014)
Pregnant Woman Held Prisoner
The first occasion I have had to review a horror film from Peru – a thriller about a young woman imprisoned and forced to bear a child. This is never a work that particularly reinvents the wheel, just turns out a solid and suspenseful imprisonment thriller
Zinda (2006)
Imprisonment and Revenge
A blatant Bollywood copy of Oldboy, often scene-for-scene