Nearly the entire film is set in a small booth with two ATMs. Inside are three coworkers, and outside is a masked killer waiting to get at them one by one. There is of course more character development than that, but in principle the plot can be boiled down to this. Few films set more or less in a single room are effective. It is hard to build suspense when you have to rely on such an enclosed space, and the performances become enormously important!
One can hardly claim that the actors are geniuses here. It works well enough, but no more than that. Nor is there any sense of claustrophobia as in Buried, but there is a killer whose outfit seems to have been inspired by the Swedish film School Night Massacre, a.k.a. Death Academy. That is really not a negative, since that film boasts one of the coolest killer get-ups ever!
But it never gets truly suspenseful; at times it is brutal and at times it is desperate, but rarely all that suspenseful. The characters are simply far too dumb and scared to even try to escape and overpower the lone assailant. On top of that, I can’t help being annoyed by how they keep complaining about how cold it is. At one point you see a thermometer reading -1°F (roughly -18°C), and that is admittedly cold. But nowhere do you see anyone’s visible breath or the ground being frozen. A bit too glaring a miss for my taste, especially since there seems to have been an ambition to be extra clever with the final twist.
It is by no means a bad film or anything, but it suffers from a few too many missteps to be truly entertaining. It is also somewhat stereotypical, which drags down the overall impression a bit. A fun idea it undeniably is, though!
