The Man in the White Van
by Hope Madden
A teen prone to exaggeration is disbelieved when she tells of a white van following her around her small Florida town. Working from a script he wrote with Sharon Y. Cobb, director Warren Skeels recreates a time when doors were left unlocked, and rebels were listening to Credence instead of the Partridge Family for his true crime thriller The Man in the White Van.
It’s 1975, but as Annie (Madison Wolfe, The Conjuring 2) tries to protect herself, Skeels takes us back to 1974, 1973, 1972, 1971, 1970 with the menacing van and the other girls nobody believed.
The story is ostensibly based on Billy Mansfield Jr.’s Seventies era crime binge, although no name is given to the driver stalking Florida streets. Skeels’s framing device—present-day Seventies storytelling punctuated with vignettes from across the murder spree—is reminiscent of Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour. But where Kendrick used cutaways to serial killer Rodney Alcala’s previous victims to deepen our understanding of the psychopath and humanize his victims, Skeels uses it to tweak tension as we wait for what is to come for young Annie.
Skeels also develops anxiety with Seventies style hijinks—the frustration of a busy signal and rotary phone dialing when in a real hurry.
Ali Larter and Sean Astin, who also serve as executive producers, help to generate a believable family dynamic as Annie’s loving but skeptical parents. Though the balance of performances are not bad, the writing is superficial enough that the ensemble can’t carve out much in the way of personality. Worse, scenes last a beat too long, the camera often lingering on each line long enough that the unnaturalness, the performance itself, becomes evident.
Interestingly, there’s something about this particular falseness and the sloppiness in the script that actually reflects Seventies horror, which is kind of fun—sort of the The Town that Dreaded Sundown era, before tropes dug in and determined every story beat.
Where Kendrick attempted to push the conversation about serial murder and horror in a fresh direction, Skeels reaches back toward an older version of the story. It doesn’t make for as compelling a film, but The Man in the White Van has its charm.
