Wes Bentley has demonstrated an uncanny ability throughout his career to act with his eyes. In the Part 2 premiere of the fifth and final season of Yellowstone, the anguished stare of Bentley’s character, the tortured Jamie Dutton, reflects the self-loathing and shock of an adopted black-sheep son who ordered a hit on his father, Yellowstone patriarch John Dutton, far more effectively than any amount of dialogue could.
Bentley’s haunting, merciless stare has enabled the actor to play many memorable villain roles, as seen with his performances as demon Blackheart in Ghost Rider, bloodthirsty game-maker Seneca Crane in The Hunger Games, and corrupt politician Adleman Lusk in Jonah Hex, among others. One of Bentley’s best and most overlooked performances is featured in the 2007 psychological horror film P2, in which Bentley plays Thomas, a psychotic security guard who terrorizes a young woman, played by Rachel Nichols, inside an underground parking garage on Christmas Eve.
While this plot description makes the movie seem like a dreary, predictable slasher film, P2 transcends the genre through its atmospheric setting, inventive execution, and especially Bentley’s gleefully deranged performance, in which Thomas’s delusion and madness, like that of Norman Bates in Psycho, is rooted in Thomas’s isolation from the outside world. Like Norman, Thomas’s murderous impulses are triggered by relatable human emotions, specifically his intense need to avoid spending Christmas alone.
Wes Bentley Is Delightfully Chilling as a Homicidal Maniac in ‘P2’
Like the best movie villains, Wes Bentley’s Thomas appears in P2 as a realistic and relatable person whose obvious insanity originates from the extreme loneliness of his solitary job as a security guard inside a desolate underground parking garage, where Thomas has manipulated the technology at his disposal to conduct surveillance of the garage’s adjoining office block and its employees, primarily Angela, a beautiful young woman whom Thomas has developed an unhealthy fascination with. All Thomas wants is for Angela to have a nice Christmas dinner with him, complete with mashed potatoes and turkey, in Thomas’s office, which he’s decorated for the occasion.
As the film opens, Angela works late in her midtown Manhattan office on Christmas Eve while her remaining colleagues leave. After leaving the office, Angela descends to the film’s titular location, the second underground parking level, where, after discovering that her car won’t start, Angela has her first encounter with Thomas, who initially seems friendly and helpful. Indeed, Thomas, in the tradition of stalking movie psychopaths, sees himself as Angela’s savior, not a villain, even after drugging her with chloroform and chaining her to a table in his office, where Thomas tells Angela he loves her.
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In contrast to the typical slasher movie formula in which the heroine purposely makes stupid choices, P2 applies intelligence and logic to seemingly every choice and situation that Angela is confronted with in the film. The clever strategy of P2 is to continually put Angela in the position of having to make the best choices amid the worsening options she’s presented with by the diabolically clever Thomas, who, in the course of terrorizing Angela, torments her by playing Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” over the garage intercom.
‘P2’ Deserves to Be a Christmas (And Non-Christmas) Horror Staple
When the best Christmas horror movies are listed, the 1974 Christmas horror classic Black Christmas invariably appears at or near the top of these lists, while the 2015 Christmas comedy horror film Krampus has been acknowledged as being a modern Christmas horror classic. In contrast, P2 has been seemingly forgotten in its post-theatrical life, especially during the Christmas holiday season, as while Black Christmas and Krampus have become fixtures on streaming and television during the Christmas season, P2 hasn’t gained much of an audience following over the past 15 years.
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One of the reasons why P2 has failed to gain traction as a Christmas horror favorite is because the film’s Christmas connection is obscured by its minimalist setting. Although P2 deserves a much higher ranking among Christmas horror films, the film is also a superior example of a single-location horror film. Bleak, shadowy, and surprisingly spacious, the underground parking garage setting of P2 effectively establishes a sense of dread and familiarity, as while virtually everyone has been inside an underground parking garage, no one wants to stay there for any extended period of time.
Roger Ebert Was Right (And Many Other Critics Were Wrong) About ‘P2’
Released theatrically in November 2007, at the beginning of the 2007 holiday box-office season, P2, which had a production cost of $3.5 million, grossed just over $2 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend of release from over 2,100 theaters, one of the worst openings for a film that was released on over 2,000 screens. P2 finished its theatrical run with a domestic gross of just under $4 million and a worldwide total of approximately $7.7 million.
At the time of its release, P2, which presently holds a 35% Rotten Tomatoes rating and 36% audience score, was dismissed by most critics as being derivative of other horror films and overly reliant on gore for effect. One of the film’s few critical admirers was the great Roger Ebert, who rightly praised the film’s ingenuity and performances. Ebert wrote:
“The movie benefits from being played about as straight as it can be, given the material. Rachel Nichols, as the endangered heroine, Angela, doesn’t do stupid things or make obvious mistakes, and Wes Bentley, as the lonely guy on overnight duty, doesn’t froth at the mouth and cackle with insane zeal. Oh, he’s insane, all right, but he’s one of those insane Lonely Guys who can’t understand why Angela doesn’t want to share his Christmas dinner (turkey and trimmings, and even corn muffins!), even though he has stripped her to her lingerie, chained her to the furniture and has a savage dog lunging at her. He’s just trying to be friends.”
P2 is now streaming for free, just in time for Christmas on Tubi.