Premonition (2007 film)

Premonition
Promotional movie poster for the film
Directed by	Mennan Yapo
Written by	Bill Kelly
Starring	Sandra Bullock Julian McMahon Nia Long
Cinematography	Torsten Lippstock
Edited by	Neil Travis
Music by	Klaus Badelt
Production company	Hyde Park Entertainment
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
Release dates	North America: March 16, 2007 United Kingdom: March 16, 2007
Running time	110 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$20 million
Box office	$84,146,832

Premonition is a 2007 drama film directed by Mennan Yapo and starring Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon. Principal photography took place in Louisiana.

Plot

Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) lives the days of an eventful week in her life out of chronological order.

Prologue

Linda and her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) get out of a car. Linda has her eyes covered, and she tells Jim that she hates surprises. Jim laughs and asks her why she wasn’t angry when he got the promotion, to which she replies that the promotion wasn’t so much a surprise as it was a result of her wonderful husband’s hard work. Jim leads Linda to the front of the house and uncovers her eyes to reveal their new house.

Thursday

Several years later, Linda is getting out of bed. Her younger daughter, Megan (Shyann McClure), runs into the room and asks where Daddy is. Linda replies lovingly that he will be back today because it was only an overnight trip. Megan asks why they weren’t allowed to go with Daddy, and Linda explains that it was a business trip, so it was better for them to stay at home. Her older daughter, Bridgette (Courtney Taylor Burness) walks in and tells her mother that she has to get up now or else they’ll be late for school.

Linda drops off her kids at school and goes home. She talks a little with her friend Annie (Nia Long), who’s going on a date. She asks how Linda and Jim are, since their relationship had gotten into a rut. Linda goes through various housewife chores: she puts stickers on the sliding glass doors to the back yard; she dusts the counters, and washes some clothes, including a bright rainbow-colored sweater. There’s one new message on the answering machine. The message confuses Linda: it’s from Jim, and he says that he meant everything he said in front of the kids the other night and he wants her to know that he was sincere. He spots a call waiting on his phone and mutters "Is that you?" before hanging up. Linda calls him back and leaves a message.

The doorbell rings and Linda opens the door to a man in a police uniform. He introduces himself as Sheriff Reilly (Marc Macaulay) and tells Linda that her husband died in a car accident involving a truck on the previous day. She’s in shock, and receives the details of her husband’s death in a blur.

After picking her girls up from school, Linda sadly tells them that their father won’t be coming home. Linda’s mother, Joanne (Kate Nelligan), is over as well and occupies Linda's daughters by helping them complete a puzzle that their Daddy was really good at and was going to help them finish. Meanwhile, Linda calls Annie and asks her to call back. After putting the kids to bed, Joanne comes to sit and talk with her daughter. She tells Linda that although it is difficult, they should start making funeral arrangements and look over Linda and Jim's insurance plans. Linda is shocked and tells her mother that she isn’t ready yet. She tells Joanne that she can’t stop thinking about the serving plate Jim’s family gave them. She had never been able to take it down by herself and Jim had always helped her. Joanne tells her daughter that no one is expecting her to do all this by herself, and she goes to sleep in the guest room. Linda falls asleep in her clothes on the living room couch alone, her wedding photo cradled in her arms.

Monday

Linda wakes up in her bed, dressed in a flimsy nightgown and covered with sheets and blankets. Somewhat confused, she gets up and knocks on the guest room door. No one is inside. Linda cautiously walks downstairs, where Jim is sitting at the counter drinking coffee and watching TV. Linda is shocked as she stares at Jim. He asks her what’s wrong, but she can only mutter that she’s had a bad dream. Megan and Bridgette come running down the stairs, with Bridgette once again complaining about being late for school. Jim asks Linda to take the kids to school because he’s late for work and rushes off.

Still in a daze, Linda drops off the kids. As she drives on, she makes an abrupt stop that angers drivers around her, and she is approached by Sheriff Reilly, who warns her to be more careful on the roads. Strangely, the Sheriff acts as if he's never met her before. Linda returns home to her chores, but notices the rainbow sweater again. She walks outside to hang laundered bedsheets. While she tries to spread out a sheet she trips on a toy and falls backwards. She falls onto the dead body of a crow and cuts her hand. Her hand is covered with blood and she runs inside. On her way in, she gets blood all over the glass door (which now has no stickers on it) and on the sink. After she’s regained some of her senses, Linda goes back out wearing rubber gloves and throws the dead animal into the trash. The day ends with a family dinner, the girls reporting a boring day.

Saturday

Linda wakes up the next day. She notices a bottle of wine and a glass on the nightstand. She can't find Jim in the shower, but finds an empty prescription bottle of lithium with pills scattered in the sink. The label on the bottle states the pills were prescribed by a Doctor Norman Roth. She finds the mirrors in the house covered in sheets while she makes her way downstairs. Still in her husband’s shirt, she encounters a group of family and friends wearing full mourning garb. Annie is there as well, and assures Linda that the kids are safe, they’re just outside. Linda goes running to her kids and finds the two girls on the swing set. Bridgette has her back turned to the camera and when Linda runs over, there are terrible red gashes all over the girl’s face. Linda quickly starts to caress her daughter’s face and asks what happened. Megan walks over and tells her mom that she doesn’t see any scars at all and that her sister looks perfect. Linda is still confused, but agrees for her daughters’ sakes and holds them close.

When they arrive at the church stairs, Linda sends the family inside, walks steadily to the hearse and demands that they open the coffin. The funeral director assures her that everything is on schedule, but tries to stop her from reaching the coffin. Suddenly the coffin falls out of the hearse, opening up and the action suggests that her late husband's head rolls out onto the pavement. Then she screams uncontrollably.

At the burial, a young priest is giving the eulogy for Jim, describing him as a wonderful man who always put his family first. Linda notices a blond woman (Amber Valletta) standing to the side of the funeral group, hiding behind a tree. Neither Joanne nor Linda recognizes the woman, but when Linda walks over, the woman apologizes profusely and tells Linda that she thought it would be okay to come since they’d talked a day earlier. Linda is still confused, but the woman speeds off before Linda can ask her any more questions.

Back at the house, Linda frantically flips through the phone book. The page with Dr. Roth's listing has been torn out, but she soon finds the page in her trashcan. She grabs the page and calls the office, and a recorded message states that the office is only open during weekdays. When she comes back downstairs later, all is well, until the doorbell rings and several very burly men enter the room. One of them introduces himself as Dr. Norman Roth (Peter Stormare) and with him are his assistants and Sheriff Reilly. Annie rushes to get the children to bed as Linda is hauled away kicking and screaming. It seems that they think Linda has mental problems because she cannot seem to remember how the cuts on Bridgette's face happened. For everybody else, the dates have been happening in order, so they know that a few days before, Bridgette crashed through the glass door and Linda took her to the hospital, but Linda does not recall any of this. Joanne apologizes, but tells Linda that what she needs right now is serious help.

Linda is taken to a mental health care facility and overhears the sheriff and Dr. Roth talking. The sheriff tells the doctor that he informed Linda of her husband's death on Thursday. The doctor recounts Linda's visit from Tuesday, when she claimed her husband was already dead. Linda is sedated by injection, and fades out.

Tuesday

Linda wakes up in her own bed again. She can't find a trace of the injection on her arms. She hears a running shower and runs into the bathroom. She goes into the shower, nightgown and all, and holds Jim. At breakfast, she is happy to see that Bridgette's face is wound-free. After dropping the girls off at school, she stops in her driveway, and opens the garbage to discover the crow's body inside. Back inside the house she goes through the phone book, finds Dr. Roth's entry, rips out the page and drives to his office. He doesn't recognize her, and initiates a session where she tells him of her experiences of seeing Jim alive and then dead again. At the end of the session he prescribes lithium.

Linda goes on to her husband’s office. She holds him in her arms and asks to speak to him in private. She wants the family to get away for a while, but Jim rejects the idea. There’s a knock on his office door and it’s Claire, the blond girl from the funeral. She’s the company’s new assistant manager and has been working with Jim. The two leave for a meeting, and Linda glimpses that Jim places his hand on the small of Claire's back as they walk away.

Later that night, the children are playing in the front yard, and Linda is in the bathroom considering the lithium. She shakes out two pills at first, then six, but then allows the entire contents to fall into the sink along with the bottle.(This is the bottle that she sees on Saturday. However, on Thursday the bottle is not there.)

Linda recognizes that it's starting to rain and yells down to the girls to hurry to the back yard and grab the sheets from the clothesline. Coming down the stairs, she sees the girls rushing to the back yard. She sees Bridgette running toward the glass doors and urges her to stop. Bridgette can't tell the door is closed and runs through it, breaking the glass and hurting her face and hands. Linda hurries the girls to the emergency room and Jim arrives shortly after. Back at home, Linda puts the girls to bed, covers the mirrors in the house so that Bridgette cannot see her scars, and tells the girls that as far as she's concerned there are no scars, and they're both beautiful, like princesses. All these things are true for the morning, she also talked to Jim on that Thursday, while he died on Wednesday. This could be explained by the fact that Thursday was some sort of 'portal day'. Everything was 'normal', up to the point that the sheriff came to her house.

Meanwhile, Jim is busy sweeping up the glass from Bridgette’s fall. He asks her why she hasn’t put the stickers up yet, and Linda says that she thought she had. He tells her that he asked Linda's mother to come live with them until Linda feels better.

Linda walks upstairs, takes off her jacket, and feels the crumpled phone book paper in her back pocket. Mindlessly she throws it in the trash. But the sight of the paper basket triggers her memory and she rushes downstairs and makes a timeline of the week's events. Tuesday is when she meets Dr. Roth for the first time, when her daughter gets the cuts. Thursday is when she gets the news about the accident and her mother stays over. She hasn’t experienced Friday yet, but Saturday is the funeral. She hides the paper under the tablecloth and goes to talk to Jim. She begs him not to go, but seeing that it's no good, requests that "If tomorrow is Wednesday, please, please wake me up before you leave". He promises.

Friday

Linda wakes up on the living room couch, understands it's Friday and drives to Claire’s house. Linda asks if they should be talking about something regarding Jim. Claire’s swollen and tear covered face tells it all as she asks who told her. Linda is brisk and piercing as she replies that Claire just did.

Linda goes out to talk with Annie. Annie gives her sympathy to Linda, saying that all of this is so terrible – Jim's death, and discovering her husband was planning to have an affair. Linda replies that maybe it isn’t so bad at all. Jim may not have done anything yet, but the affair would have had a destructive impact on their family. She tells Annie that maybe all of this was meant to happen. Annie is surprised, but Linda knows that things are finally coming together for her.

Linda then visits the insurance agent to confirm the stability of her family's future. He tells her that everything is covered for, because Jim came in the morning of his accident and tripled his life insurance plans. Linda is very confused, but thanked him. After making funeral arrangements, Linda drives home and tells her mother that she’s made all the plans. Her mother’s reaction is similar to Annie’s and later that night she goes to talk to her daughter. With a glass of wine at her side and dressed in Jim’s shirt, Linda asks her mother whether, if Linda let Jim die, that would be the same as killing him; but Joanne replied that Jim is already dead, eliciting an enigmatic glare from Linda.

Sunday

Linda wakes up on the previous Sunday. She sends Jim off with the kids while she drives to the church. There, she speaks with Father Kennedy (Jude Ciccolella) and explains that she’s very scared. He’s surprised to see her, because it’s been a while since she’s been in church. Kennedy has an entire book detailing incidents similar to hers. A woman during the colonial period predicted a terrible hurricane coming in and destroying the entire town. She was hanged as a witch, and two days later, the town was destroyed by a hurricane with gale force winds. In a more recent period, a man from 1918 saw the gravestones of his two young children in a dream during the influenza pandemic. He went home and shot the children to save them from the pain of the sickness, but the autopsies showed that they were never infected. The man ended up killing himself a week later. Kennedy explains that the faithless are like empty vessels. There’s nothing inside, so they’re more susceptible to greater forces. He says that she must have faith and that life itself can be a miracle. Linda tells Kennedy that she doesn’t believe in miracles, but she desperately needs faith and stability right now and asks him how she can get it. Kennedy tells her that faith is simply the belief in something you can’t see or touch, but you can feel, such as love and hope. She must find something to believe in, something she’s willing to fight for. Linda tearfully tells the Father that she doesn’t know what to fight for.

Eventually, Linda visits the site of the accident. She parks her car and stands in the middle of the road. She stares at the "Mile 220" sign, which is where Sheriff Reilly told her the accident took place. Images of her family flash before her eyes as Linda tries to decide what to do. Her thoughts are interrupted by another car passing, and she gets back into her car.

That night, Linda puts pressure on Jim. When the kids go to give their father a goodnight hug, Linda tells them to give him an extra hug and to tell their father how much they love him. Jim hugs the kids back, but doesn’t say anything. Linda asks him why he’s not returning the sentiment and Jim is taken aback. He holds the girls close once again and tells them that he loves them more than anything in the entire world. They ask him if he loves Linda too, and he says he does, which explains the message Jim left on Linda's answering machine.

Jim finds Linda standing in the middle of the yard. Heavy rain is falling, but Linda refuses to budge. Jim joins her shortly and asks her what’s wrong. She starts to tell him that they aren’t the same family any more and she misses that. She wants to return to what they used to be. Jim tells her that they are still that family, that things are just different. Linda starts to cry as a storm starts. A lightning bolt hits the power lines and a dead crow falls to the ground. Jim takes Linda into the house after a rogue powerline heads toward them and they retreat to their room. Jim sighs as he sits down on his bed. Linda walks over and tenderly embraces him as she apologizes for everything, and they have sex. Later Jim holds Linda close and she tells him that she’s had a dream where he died. He tells her that it’s just a dream, and that everything will be fine.

Wednesday

Linda wakes up in her bed once again. Since she can't be sure of what day it is, she grabs the phone and calls Annie, who tells her that it’s definitely Wednesday. Linda runs down the stairs knowing that today is the day of the accident. She finds a note from Jim saying that he’s taking the kids to school and will be back tomorrow. Linda takes off and begins to search for Jim.

Meanwhile, Jim drops the kids off at school, and then goes to the insurance company. He looks worried as he raises the amount of the life insurance. Later, as he makes a turn to get onto the highway, he gets a call from Claire. She’s just arrived in their hotel room and is evidently very excited. A troubled Jim tells her that he can’t go through with the affair, and he hangs up.

Jim then calls the house and leaves the message from the beginning of the film. At the same time, a frantic Linda is trying to reach Jim. After hearing a beep signaling that he has another call, Jim hangs up realizing that it's Linda. He answers the call. The two have a touching reconciliation, Linda smiling asks him to pull over to the shoulder of the road and Jim pulls over. Linda notices that they’ve reached the "Mile 220" sign and tells Jim that if he trusts her, he must turn around. Jim does so, but not before narrowly being missed by a speeding car. He stops the car and is unable to get it started again. Linda notices a fuel truck approaching and she is now hysterical, screaming at Jim to get out of the car. Jim sits and keeps on trying to start the car. Realizing that he's losing time Jim frantically tries to open his car door, but he can't. The truck slams into Jim’s car, crushing its roof and presumably decapitating Jim. The truck then explodes on impact, causing the car to explode on impact also (due to the huge amount of gasoline in the truck). Linda breaks down and starts to sob uncontrollably.

Epilogue

The movie ends with Linda back home asleep on a mattress with no sheets, her daughters run in and tell her that the moving truck has arrived. Linda kisses her daughters and comments with a smile that her daughter's scars from the accident are healing well. The girls then leave the room and do not close the door. Linda moves to sit on the edge of the bed when suddenly Father Kennedy's voice runs through her head, saying that every day we’re alive can be a miracle. She smiles slightly, and gets up slowly, exposing a pregnant belly.

The alternate ending shows Linda getting up exactly as she does before. All of a sudden she hears the shower running. She walks slowly to the bathroom, pulls open the shower curtain and the screen goes black.

Cast

• Sandra Bullock as Linda Hanson
• Julian McMahon as Jim Hanson
• Nia Long as Annie
• Kate Nelligan as Joanne
• Amber Valletta as Claire Francis
• Peter Stormare as Dr. Norman Roth
• Marc Macaulay as Sheriff Reilly
• Courtney Taylor Burness as Bridgette Hanson
• Shyann McClure as Megan Hanson
• Jude Ciccolella as Father Kennedy
• E.J. Stapleton as Model Home Salesman

Reception

Box office

Premonition opened in 2,831 theaters and came in third place behind 300 and Wild Hogs, and grossed $17,558,689 with a $6,202 average. The film stayed in theaters for 7 weeks and grossed $47,852,604 in the United States and $84,146, 832 worldwide.

Reviews

The film received mostly negative reviews from film critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 8% of 157 critics have given the film a positive review, with a rating average of 3.8 out of 10. The site's general consensus is that "Overdosing on flashbacks, and more portentous than profound, the overly obtuse Premonition weakly echoes such twisty classics as Memento, The Sixth Sense, and Groundhog Day." Among the site's notable critics, 14% gave the film a positive write-up, based on a sample of 36. Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from film critics, the film is considered to have "mixed or average reviews" with a rating score of 29 based on 30 reviews. Despite the weak reviews, several critics, including Rex Reed, commend Sandra Bullock for her performance.

External links

• Official Site
• Premonition at IMDb
• Premonition at AllMovie
• Premonition at Rotten Tomatoes
• Premonition at Box Office Mojo
• Premonition at Metacritic
• Premonition Trailer
• DVD Review at Monsters and Critics