“Premonition,” a thriller featuring Sandra Bullock, is a movie I would never suggest anyone to watch. I had high hopes for the film as Bullock is a star that I am always excited to watch, until I saw this movie. The movie’s plot was confusing, it felt like a horror movie not a thriller, and had many cheesy parts. 

The movie starts off by depicting a happy family starting their life in a picturesque suburb with two children. The movie then suddenly takes a turn when the mom of the family Linda Hanson, played by Bullock, gets news that her husband died in a car accident. The main character Hanson wakes up the next morning to see her husband in the kitchen very much alive. Everything starts to go downhill when Hanson continues to wake up and relive her husband’s death in different ways. 

In my opinion, this is where the plot gets confusing. The movie’s timeline becomes scattered and moves in a nonlinear fashion, making it impossible for audiences to understand if Hanson is dreaming or if time is being warped. 

In a Zoom interview, Bullock fan and California State University Channel Islands student Alyson Lucas said, “I was confused the whole time. It came to a point where my confusion turned into annoyance.”

Throughout the non-chronological parts of the film, we see Hanson taking medication, alluding to the possibility that she is dealing with mental health issues. It then skips to a scene where Hanson is forcefully taken into a mental hospital. My immediate thought was that “Premonition” would explain all prior confusions and plot holes as false perceptions of reality through the main character’s point of view. 

According to Looper, she is admitted to the hospital because of the premonitions she has of her husband’s death. However, the movie’s plot did not focus on what the people in Hanson’s life believed about her premonitions. In my opinion, there was no point in having this scene, it only made the audience more confused.  

The film also blended horror genre tropes into a self-proclaimed thriller. The film is categorized as a thriller, not a horror movie but the film was reminiscent of several horror genre patterns. 

An example of this is when Hanson’s daughter, in an early scene, is wearing a black dress and we see her from behind sitting on a swing set. When we see her daughter’s face she has multiple stitches that reflect images of creepy dolls from other horror genre films. Later on in the movie, we find out that her daughter ran through a glass door, giving her this appearance. This made the film feel like a horror movie, not a thriller.

 A scene that made me not want to recommend this movie to anyone, happened as Hanson demanded to see her husband’s body in his casket to verify it was him. As the characters are shown yelling and shuffling to get the casket out of the hearse they drop his casket and his head rolls onto the ground. This was one of the cheesiest scenes I have seen in a film. It surprised me as I felt that Bullock normally partakes in a higher standard of movies. 

“I love Sandra Bullock’s character in the movies ‘The Blind Side’ and ‘The Proposal.’ She did a good job of acting in ‘Premonition,’ but the screenwriting was just too disturbing and misleading to be enjoyable,” Lucas said. 

The cherry on top for me was in the last scene. Having had the premonition of her husband being hit by a car, she tries to save him by stopping this event from happening. However, her husband still gets hit by the car. I think it’s fine that he ended up dying because it makes it different from a cliche ending where she saves him. In the very last scene, we see Hanson holding her stomach with the implication she is pregnant. Again, this had nothing to do with any earlier scenes in the movie and it adds more cheesiness to the film again. 

I could see what the movie was working towards in having a complex plot and eerie elements but the execution of the film was done poorly and I would not recommend this film to anyone.