After a prologue of ghostly nightmares followed by a nerve-racking dinner with friends, Anne (Synnove Karlsen), who is on a break with her abusive partner Patrick (Luke Norris), gets into a cab, which Patrick also forces his way into, to head home. The cab driver is Ian (Nick Frost), who at first seems sympathetic to Anne and hostile to Patrick’s abuses, but he soon kidnaps them both, tasing Patrick and zip-tying their hands as he drives through the night toward an unclear destination. Along the way, Anne notices an occasional fourth among them, a phantom woman who sometimes occupies mirror and window reflections, and sometimes appears on the side of the road — white, translucent, and decayed, contorting her body and making menacing faces, as movie ghosts are wont to do. Soon it becomes clear that Ian knows about this woman too, and she seems to have something to do with their destination.
Director Bruce Goodison’s film uses a haunted road framing that is reminiscent of the BBC’s Christmas ghost stories, but the runtime is double or triple most of those, and you feel this, mostly in the form of plot developments being stretched quite thin, and imagery being revisited quite a bit, without much actual variance. On the other side of the same coin, the times when the film isn’t anxious to push you along and keep you on the narrative hook is actually where its strengths lie, as the damned road trip becomes a droning, hypnotic affair. One tracking shot in particular of the cab simply traveling along is heightened by what seems like a puddle of rain somehow amassed in front of the lens, creating an organically shifting, blurred distortion. The cab’s windows are also used very well at times, as in a gas station sequence where Anne hopes that Ian will return to the car and open the door while a potentially helpful stranger is within earshot. A sort of misty hall of mirrors standoff ensues, with Anne unsure if Ian has noticed her anticipation from afar, until it seems like he’s waiting for the stranger to leave.
The more or less single location presents a challenge that the actors are up for, and Frost in particular gets some mileage modulating between his well-known comedic persona and a more startling loose-cannon tenor, and even wringing out a little bit of pathos to boot. But for a film that seems to want to trade in surprise, the overall narrative is telegraphed pretty early on, and the twists are visible well in advance. But upon arrival to its expected destination, rather than feeling like some resonant foreshadowing has landed, the film falls a bit flat. So while Black Cab does possess some gorgeous and mesmerizing gothic qualities, and has all the pieces of a classically spooky tale, it might have done well to lean into the former some more, and trusted the viewer to connect more of the latter’s dots on their own.
DIRECTOR: Bruce Goodison; CAST: Nick Frost, Synnove Karlsen, Luke Norris; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: November 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 27 min.
Comments are closed.