Director/Screenplay – Marc Schießer, Producers – Tobias ‘Tui’ Lohf & Marc Schießer, Photography – Daniel Ernst & Tobias ‘Tui’ Lohf, Music – Marcel Becker-Neu, Visual Effects Supervisors – Jonas ‘Doc’ Ahrichs & Yannik Heb, Visual Effects – Outside the Club, Special Effects – CFX Spezialeffekte (Supervisor – Andre Markossa), Production Design – Laura Schwarzmeier. Production Company – Outside the Club Productions.
Cast
Sina Martens (Malina Voss), Luise Helm (Voice of Elisa Kühne), Artjom Gilz (Enno Bent), Poal Cairo (The Driver), Charles Rettinghaus (Voice of Wolfgang Voss), Janina Sachau (Voice of Mone Voss)
Plot
Med student Malina Voss comes around a prisoner in the trunk of a car. She finds that her kidney has been removed. She was about to depart with her boyfriend Enno Bent when she was abruptly attacked and abducted. With only her cellphone to hand, she tries to reach out to emergency services and alert authorities to where she is. She calls her father to find that he has been contacted about paying a ransom for her. Things become more complicated as her abductor drives over the border into Czechia and Malina’s efforts to alert others are thwarted, leaving the likelihood that she will be killed.
Trunk was the first feature film for director/writer Marc Schießer who had previously made the doppelganger tv movie Schattenmoor (2019) and created/directed the tv series Wishlist (2016- ) about an app that answers wishes.
The most obvious point of comparison to Trunk is The Call (2013), which had an abducted Abigail Breslin locked in the trunk of a car and contacting 911 call operator Halle Berry for help. There is the same relationship between the abducted girl and the emergency services operator here. The one crucial difference is that in The Call Halle Berry’s 911 operator was the central character and the bulk of the story’s focus was on her, whereas here the focus throughout is with the abducted Sina Martens locked in the trunk and we never meet Luise Helm’s emergency services operator as anything other than a voice on the other end of the phone. Six months after Trunk appeared, the Danish-made The Girl in the Trunk (2024) came out with an identical premise.
In actuality, what Trunk reminds of far more than The Call is Buried (2010), a film that took place entirely with Ryan Reynolds imprisoned in a coffin where his sole contact with the rest of the world was via his cellphone. Trunk substitutes a car trunk and stays inside it with Sina Martens the entire time, just like Buried did, venturing outside of it only in a couple of shots right at the start and briefly right at the end. Moreover, while Ryan Reynolds had a cellphone, he basically used it for that purpose only ie. making calls, whereas here Sina Martens uses a whole bunch of other apps available on a modern cellphone – camera, mapping, video, text, torch, and at one point even consults WikiHow on how to get out of a trunk.
Sina Martens trapped in a car trunk
Despite being confined to such a cramped space, Trunk come filled with tight tensions and twists, including Sina Martens at one point having a corpse thrown into the trunk alongside her and then drowning as the car goes off a bridge and underwater. Not to mention a script that winds up the complications in the revelations about what is or isn’t happening and the rescue attempts that come out through the course of the various calls – Sina seems to flip every few minutes between wanting to be rescued and then deciding she doesn’t.
Sina Martens’s heroine displays considerable ingenuity – with almost nothing to hand managing to create improvised mirrors and even sew a bloody wound in her side up using a sneaker lace as thread! (Although the whole organ harvesting subplot is something that is never explained). Sina Martens is required to carry almost the entire film on her own, reacting to voices on the phone and occasionally the face of her abductor looking her. As such, she gives a strong performance.
