Stream It Or Skip It?
We just sat through Daddio and now the uncomfortable-convos-with-a-cabbie conceit gets another workout with Black Cab (now streaming on Shudder). This one is different though, being a thriller with a supernatural-horror fringe that writer Virginia Gilbert and director Bruce Goodison hope are two great tastes that taste great together. The hook here is Nick Frost, the jovial goofster we know best from various Edgar Wright films and collabs with pal Simon Pegg; here, he plays an unsettling cabbie who has nefarious plans for his passenger, so it’s outside the norm for his persona. Does it work? Let’s find out.
BLACK CAB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Whenever you see a barefoot woman in a white nightgown running through a misty wood, it’s an omen. She’s almost always a ghost, and you can bet your nest egg that nothing good happened to her to make her a ghost. And if I’m not mistaken, the barefoot white nightgown ghost-woman in Black Cab is pregnant. We hang with her at a distance for a minute before Anne (Synnove Karlsen) wakes up – the nightgown lady was just a dream. OR WAS IT? I’ll never tell!
Anne shakes off the cobwebs from her creepy nap and gets dressed so she can fulfill her pending dinner engagement – reluctantly. She picks up her engagement ring and vehemently sets it back down. Not gonna wear that. Patrick (Luke Norris) gave it to her, and as we’re about to learn, he’s a real pissant’s pissant. The two of them meet another couple for dinner and it’s increasingly clear that Patrick is, at the very least, a psychologically abusive crumb of a human being. Dinner goes poorly, especially when it comes to the part where Patrick shares that he and Anne are engaged, even though she kicked his ass out and is gutting out this dinner obligation for reasons unspoken. She wises up and R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts.
Anne flags down a cab, but Patrick follows her and hops in despite her protests. The driver is Ian (Frost), who listens somewhat incredulously to Patrick when he says to just drive with no specific destination. Your money, buddy is Ian’s attitude. Ian senses that things aren’t right between Patrick and Anne, especially since they drag a black cloud into the cab and argue in the midst of it. Ian makes the noble gesture of a Woman’s Ally when he suggests they dump Patrick and get Anne home, but it doesn’t happen. Then Ian recognizes Anne: He gave her a ride just the other day. Home from the hospital. Hospital? Patrick spits. And Ian’s like, yeah, the maternity hospital. Guess the cat’s out of the bag that the bun’s in the oven.
Goddammit, Ian. He seems to believe no secrets should be kept around here. That’s the first dramatic escalation. The second is when Ian pulls over and pulls out a taser and zaps the bejeezus out of Patrick. “What a f—ing rotter!” he exclaims, and we can’t help but agree. We were sick of his shit, too. But if we haven’t jumped off the Ian train for sharing the aforementioned announcement, we will now, because he zip-ties the unconscious Patrick to a door handle and cuffs Anne and takes her on a mystery trip down a long, dark road through a long, dark wood. It’s nighttime, it’s drizzly, it’s foggy and – well, I’ll be damned if this isn’t the type of dark, damp, misty setting that’s a haven for lady ghosts in white nightgowns!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It’s Daddio meets Collateral meets a lame generic supernatural horror flick where apparitions appear and disappear at will like, I dunno, Insidious 2 or something.
Performance Worth Watching: Frost is fun to watch as he wavers from an endearing weirdo who annoys his passengers by singing along loudly to his favorite oldies, to a wacko nut who, with his girth and big glasses, resembles John Goodman in Lebowski, but with a couple extra loose screws.
Memorable Dialogue: Ian overshares about his taser: “When I first got it, I tried it on myself. Hee hee – f—in’ hurt! Dunno if I should tell you this, but I wet myself!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Black Cab spends about 90 percent of its runtime tooling down the road in the cab, taffy-stretching the tension as Ian teases their destination and gives Anne hints of his psychological profile: He has a wife and a son and it sure seems like he doesn’t live with them anymore, possibly because he’s a sociopath who seems bent on torturing these particular passengers, or possibly, I dunno, feeding them to the ghost? I mean, nightgown-ghost lady looks a bit gaunt. She could use a little protein.
Problem is, this is a 30-minute premise stretched to three times its tensile strength. It might’ve worked if Gilbert focused tighter on developing the characters and driving the story via dialogue. But despite Frost’s game performance, the writing fails him by giving him not enough truly clever or menacing or interesting or psychologically curlicued manipulative things to say. Somewhere in here is a steely chiller about the human capacity for cruelty, but it lacks the nerve to be truly upsetting. Anne’s lack of depth dilutes the sense of dramatic stakes, which are cluttered by a ghost-story component that feels tacked on to pad the run time. If Black Cab had a little more focus and leaned more intently into its minimalist concept, it might’ve worked, but as it stands, it progresses in fits and starts to an underwhelming, unmemorable conclusion.
Our Call: Black Cab has flashes of promise, but ultimately goes nowhere. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.