Frank Harrington (Ray Wise),wife Laura (Lin Shaye),son Richard (Mick Cain),daughter Marion (Alexandra Holden),and her boyfriend Brad Miller are going to the hated family Christmas hosted by Laura's mother. Frank falls asleep and nearly crashes the car. He had taken a short cut despite 20 years of driving on the same main road. The road is empty and all the clocks stopped at 7:30. They encounter a Lady in White (Amber Smith).

The son is an annoying brat. The father is a control freak. I love Ray Wise and Lin Shaye does a fun crazy. They're not the nicest or quietest family but it's very relatable especially for a Christmas movie. It's a nice Twilight Zone episode. It's obvious what happened after noticing the clocks. I'm willing to let the characters be stupid since no one would actually want to consider the truth of their situation. The father's explanation is both desperate and unrealistic which actually fits him and their situation. This is a very nice ghost story one tells around a campfire.

Christmas Eve. On his way to his in-laws with his family, Frank Harrington (Ray Wise) decides to try a shortcut, for the first time in twenty years. It turns out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

While Ray Wise takes the lead, it is also great to see cult icon Lin Shaye in this one. She is excellent (as always) and her character just gets more interesting as the film goes on...

The weakest part? Some of the dialogue is pretty terrible and some of it is dated (a Marilyn Manson joke in 2003),but some is pretty amusing (the "season of giving" comment). I am not sure if this is a language barrier thing (the creators are French),a script issue or if the acting is just flat at times...

I gotta admit: in the beginning, I got distinct B-movie vibes due to the weird dialogue from the brother, and the styling of the woman in white. I thought she was supposed to be a ghost, but she didn't seem that scary to me, so I thought I was in for a disappointment. Luckily, I was dead wrong.

This is one of those movies where the less you know, the better. You have to go in as a blank slate and figure the movie out for yourself. Knowing the - extremely simple - plot is just going to suck the fun out of it.

So, the spoiled story goes(yes, the entire movie is spoiled): a family of four and the daughter's boyfriend is driving on a highway through the woods, when the father spots a woman in a white dress. He stops the car and tries to help her and the baby she's presumably carrying. Chaos ensues. Each time they for whatever reason stops the car, one of them will be "kidnapped" by a mystery driver in a black car, and later found on the road horribly disfigured(and dead).

The actors do what the movie demands, and I thought they were perfectly casted. The atmosphere is fitting, and I was so concentrated on what was going on at the screen that I for once didn't notice any music. The camera is fine; it's not trying to be an art movie, and neither should it. Action-packed movies rarely work when there's too much artsy angles to distract you from the fun.

Some people have complained about the ending, calling it a cop out, or out of place - that they don't want the mystery resolved in such a bad way. While I think the execution was a little cheesy, I don't understand the rest of these complaints. It's like we were watching a different movie; wasn't the mystery driver revealed to be Death himself? It's literally the only thing that ties this movie together for me - otherwise it would've just been another mystery horror with an empty plot.

The father was supposed to have fallen asleep while he was driving the car, so he crashed into another car with a woman and her baby inside. So, because there's a moment where they are between life and death, they all exist together on this purgatory-like never-ending highway, until Death comes and picks them up. When he is done, he leaves them on the road as they died(the brother burned up by car explosion, the mother due to a trauma in her head, the dad because of glass shards, etc.) and moves on to take the next life. That's why, at the end, Death leaves the daughter alone; she only got hit in the head, and didn't completely die, so she was allowed to leave.

Sorry for the long explanation, but the ending is partially why this movie gets such a high rating from me. Why else would the movie in any way make sense? And not only was the plot increasingly scary to me as it progressed,(one of the few horror movies with actual horror) it even left me something to think about. Like how the family members were all confessing terrible things to each other and acting all hedonistic; in some way, those that were dying knew what was happening to them, so they were doing their last deeds, and saying their last words. It at least made sure that not all of this weird dialogue and actions could be considered for shock value only, and it made the movie seem less mean-spirited at the end than it seemed to me at the beginning(which is usually a good thing in a horror movie).

The movie does lose a few points, however, for dragging out the off-screen gore a bit too much. As an example, the moment with the mother and her brain was creepy at first, but then she became a maniac and it lost the horrific feeling I was starting to get. Or the brother's loud jerking off... Not normally squeamish, but it didn't advance the plot at all. I also don't understand why the woman in white bit his lip off; the woman in white was supposed to be fleeing from death, too, with her dead baby in her arms... Why was she suddenly acting like Death's little helper? Why was she never found left for dead? It felt like they were trying to lead us on with a ghost story, and they created a plothole in doing just that. I think there were other ways they could've done that without losing it's integrity, so it loses a couple of stars for that, too.

All in all, though, I can only recommend.