‘The Man in the White Van’ Review: A Middle of the Road Thriller
Though there is plenty to like about The Man in the White Van, it will leave many viewers wanting more.

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What is The Man in the White Van About?

The Man in the White Van adapts a real-life firsthand account of an encounter with a serial killer into a stalker-thriller set in 1975.
As the middle child of a family of five, Annie feels unseen and underappreciated. Her vivid imagination leads Annie to a habit of embellishing stories as a way of getting the attention of her parents. However, her tendency to stretch the truth means that her parents don’t believe her when Annie tells them about a man in a white van who has been stalking her. As the days go by, the van gets closer, and a confrontation seems inevitable.
The Man in the White Van was directed and co-written by Warren Skeels, with Sharon Y. Cobb as his co-writer. The story is loosely based on the personal story of a woman who survived an encounter with convicted serial killer Billy Mansfield in the 1970s. Starring in The Man in the White Van as Annie is Madison Wolfe. Brec Bassinger plays Annie’s older sister Margaret, and Gavin Warren plays her younger brother Daniel. Annie’s parents are played by Sean Astin and Ali Larter. Skai Jackson and Noah Lomax round out the main cast as Annie’s best friend and high-school crush respectively.
The Man in the White Van Review

The Man in the White Van plays it fairly safe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an entertaining movie, it’s just that some of the intended tension might be undercut by the fact that everything happens in a very predictable way.
One thing The Man in the White Van does very well is how it handles the actual man in the van. Similar to a film like Black Christmas (1974), we never get a good look at the killer. The best we get is a shadowy view of his face very late in the proceedings, but his features are still mostly hidden in darkness. This is a nice, creepy touch that helps support the idea that the events of the movie could be happening anywhere, at any time. It gives the movie an overall feeling of uneasiness since we can’t pin our fears on someone specific. It also makes the van the villain, in much the same way as the truck is seen as the villain in Duel (1971).

Also, the movie has a great way of establishing the danger and depravity of the man in the van slowly over time. Annie’s story is set in 1975, but the audience is periodically shown flashbacks of the man’s deadly actions that go back a few years. The movie opens with one of the killer’s previous crimes. It’s a short scene that hints at his brutality. Later, after we’ve met Annie and her family, we see another flashback taking place a year after the previous one. This time we see a little more of what the man does to his victims. This cycle repeats a few more times until the time progression of the flashbacks meets the current time of the main story. It works like a clever shorthand to give the viewer a sense of the man in the white van closing in on Annie over time, even though they only came together recently. It’s very smart, and it effectively builds tension.

As for Annie’s side of the story, that can dip maybe a little too much into frustrating tropes. Establishing Annie as a spinner of yarns early on in the movie is an obvious way to make it so that nobody believes her later on when she talks about the van following her. That’s a perfectly reasonable way of creating conflict, but when Annie’s pleas for help are ignored over and over again, it gets tiring. It also reflects poorly on her family, pushing them away from being clueless and into the realm of being actively antagonistic.
Minor frustrations aside, The Man in the White Van still delivers good thrills for anyone looking for a straightforward stalker movie. It’s well made, it looks good, and it hits all the right beats for its genre.
The Man in the White Van Rating and Recommendation

Star Rating: 3 out of 5
Don’t expect to be blown away, but if all you’re looking for is a decent, not too tense or scary PG-13 stalker flick, The Man in the White Van will get the job done. This van is definitely driving down the middle of the road.
The Man in the White Van is currently streaming on TVOD platforms including Prime Video.