Taking its cues as much from Joel Schumacher’s claustrophobic Phone Booth (2002) as anything else, ATM is a Christmas-themed “people-trapped-in-a-confined-space” horror that falls flat on almost every level. Scriptwriter Chris Sparling had form with this sort of thing, having already trapped Ryan Reynolds in a wooden coffin in the far better Buried (2010), directed by Rodrigo Cortés, but ATM proves once and for all that lightning rarely strikes twice. Illogical and flatly directed with a marked lack of tension by David Brooks, it certainly had potential but no-one involved with it had any idea how to capitalise on it.

Young stockbroker David Hargrove (Brian Geraghty) is having a bad day. He’s lost a client’s life savings in some dubious investments and the colleague he’s had a crush on, Emily Brandt (Alice Eve), is preparing to leave for another job. At a Christmas party, he offers to drive her home but has to take his drunk and obnoxious co-worker Corey Thompson (Josh Peck) with them. Corey wants to stop off for a pizza but doesn’t have any money so gets David to stop off an ATM booth in the middle of a large car park (the first of the film’s many idiocies – why do these young professionals not use cards to pay for their food? They seem to be the world’s only strap-cashed stockbrokers). Once inside the booth, the trio spot a sinister hooded figure in a parka coat lurking outside and are horrified when he kills a passing dog walker. With no phones (conveniently they’ve either lost them, left them in the car or the batteries are dead) and getting colder by the minute after the man switches off the heating, they have to find a way out and back to the car before he kills them.

Many questions are asked, but few are answered, chief among which are who the mysterious man is and why he’s targeting these three in particular. Some have speculated that he’s the man whose money David lost, which makes a certain sense, but the end credits suggest that he’s been casing the ATM booth for some time and that he’s off to do the same to someone else. The idea of being randomly targeted by a vicious killer is certainly a scary one, but the lack of tension and suspense means that we never really get any sense of that. Other plotting illogicalities include why Corey lies about having a cigarette lighter (it feels like the film is building to a reveal that he’s in cahoots with the killer, but he isn’t), a ridiculous twist ending that relies on you taking an awful lot on faith (just how does the killer keep himself off the ATM’s CCTV?) and being asked to accept that a trio of young people deliberately trashing an ATM machine wouldn’t have triggered so many alarms that the police didn’t turn up immediately. It’s all so shoddily written, hoping that we’re just going to overlook the many contrivances and character idiocies needed to keep the plot moving.

In the opening scenes, Sparling does quite well by his characters, making David and Emily potentially quite likable but once everyone’s trapped in the booth, they revert to stereotypes and we become decreasingly invested in their fates. The three leads do what they can but there’s ultimately little meat on the bones of their characters so you just don’t care – they aren’t interesting or bright enough to engage us, and the killer’s anonymity just turns him into a cypher (the killer in a winter coat had already been done in Urban Legend (1998) anyway). We’re told that they’re isolated and far from help, yet other victims for the killer keep popping by (where are they coming from?) and they do nothing to help themselves by parking their car so far away from the booth despite the rest of the car park being empty.

Sparling tries to spice things up a bit by giving us a mid-film twist (someone we thought was dead turns out not to be) and hits us with another one at the end that’s so badly bungled you’ll be more bemused than amazed by it. The climax is needlessly drawn out and the fact that the killer manages to evade the CCTV cameras seems to hint at a supernatural element – how else do we explain how he gets away with his ridiculously convoluted plot, one that remains irritatingly obscure to the bitter end. Also, the fact that it’s set at Christmas seems entirely superfluous to the plot. The killer needs David, Emily and Corey to be cold to add to the torment of his young victims, but his plot could as easily be set at any other point in winter. After the party, that’s the last mention we get of the season, which just makes it feel like a cynical ploy to tap into the ever-popular craze for Yuletide horror. And it needed something a little extra to make up for the lousy script but setting it at Christmas simply isn’t enough.

Prior to ATM, Brooks had only directed the short horror film Gone (2009) and ATM turned out to be his last gig in the role. He stuck to producing after this, staying with the genre for Zachary Donohue’s The Den (2013) and Daniel Stamm’s Prey for the Devil (2022). It was probably for the best. Sparling also stayed with horror and science fiction, writing The Atticus Institute (2015), which he directed himself, Cortés’ Down a Dark Hall (2018), Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland (2020) and Adam Salky’s Intrusion (2021) among other things.