Premonition (12A) Mystery thriller about a woman's recurring nightmare, starring Sandra Bullock and Julian McMahon.

LINDA Hanson (Sandra Bullock) has a beautiful house, a loving husband and two adorable daughters. Her life is perfect, until the day she receives the devastating news that her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a car accident.

For this devoted wife and mother, it's the worst she could imagine.

But did she imagine it? When Linda wakes up the following morning her husband is very much alive.

At first, Linda believes the accident must have been a nightmare. Then it happens again; some days Linda awakens to find Jim is next to her alive and well, while on others she awakens a widow. Inexplicably, she is living the days of her life out of order.

Linda's traumatising premonition sets off a series of puzzling, time-altering events. Her world is turned upside down as the surreal circumstances lead her to discover that her perfect life may not have been all that it appeared.

Desperate to save her family, Linda begins a furious race against time and fate to try to preserve everything she and Jim have built together.

Bullock says she was in the frame of mind to do, as she puts it, "not a horror film, but a scary film, scary because of the subject matter, but also that element where you're walking down the stairs, and just the creak of the stairs makes everything more charged.

"And within the first couple of pages of reading the script for Premonition, I just loved it!"

For Bullock, the part of Linda offered many intriguing possibilities.

"Linda becomes what I think the American dream is - a house, two kids, married to your sweetheart - that sort of idealised life we think we want.

"Then there's the mortgage, the monotony of the day-to-day, and the separation that happens to a lot of people when the love starts to pull apart because of the pressures in life.

"And that's where we start the story, when these strange events start happening.

"You have a woman who's complacent, sort of numb, a husband who's the same, not feeling anymore, and these events bring up the question: if you had the chance to make a U-turn to fix something, would you, or would you just continue on and change your life?' "To reconnect or start afresh, that's the fork in the road that's presented to her."

Australian actor Julian McMahon, best-known for the TV series Nip/Tuck, says when he read the script, he was immediately hooked: "The first few times I read it I was just fascinated by the juxtaposition of time vs. the travelling of the characters, and what they mean to each other.

"Then I started getting into the whole psychology of it, and after the fifth or sixth time I read it I realised how draining the whole thing is. It's a devastating psychological thriller."

Jim, says McMahon, is the catalyst for everything that happens in Premonition.

"This isn't a character I have played before: a more middle-American regular guy who is just living his life while his wife is going through an extraordinary experience."

Nia Long, who plays Linda's best friend Annie, says: "I think we all have a little bit of curiosity when it comes to a spiritual realm that we can't really explain. So there's that fine line between seeing and believing, knowing and believing, and then saying, should I question this or accept it for what it is?"

Kate Nelligan, who was cast in the crucial role of Linda's mother, Joanne, was also intrigued by the delicately intertwined nature of the story.

"The script is very well-written, compressing time, moving backward and forward so you never know whether you're in real time or the future. It's very clever - like a puzzle."