After a night out, Anne and Patrick’s tense silence turns to terror when their jovial black cab driver reveals a chilling agenda: he’s not taking them home. Trapped on a desolate, supposedly haunted road, they must confront the dark secret of their captor’s true intentions —are they facing madness or pure evil?
Note: Nick Frost and other members of the cast and crew will introduce the film and Q&A.
Grimmfest Says: A bickering couple, in a black cab driven by a maniac, hurtling across the open countryside at night… What appears at first to be a straightforward, claustrophobic, psychological thriller gradually reveals itself to be an altogether tricksier, slipperier, spookier tale, as secrets are revealed, and nightmares prove all-too-prophetic. Shot in and around Manchester and Lancashire, the film benefits from an intelligent interaction with its location, repurposing and rejuvenating an age-old urban myth by grafting it onto local legends about a certain unfortunately numbered A Road, with chilling effect. Nick Frost, smartly cast against type as the increasingly volatile cab driver, Ian, leans hard into the underlying menace which has been a part of his habitual affable comic persona since the days of SPACED. Moving seamlessly from slightly creepy over-friendliness to psychopathic menace, to guilt-driven, ghost-haunted desperation, he is very much the anchor and motor of the film, bringing complexity and nuance, a dash of dark humour, and far more sympathy to the role than most actors would. And he’s more than matched by Synnove Karlson and Luke Norris as the increasingly desperate abductees.
Part of our FEAR ON FOUR WHEELS strand.