Black Cab Review: Nick Frost plays a creepy taxi driver in this ghostly tale

PLOT: When Anne and Patrick hail a black cab after a night out their driver is chatty, jovial even, but they are in no mood to talk. In fact, the couple is barely on speaking terms. That is, until they realize the driver has no intention of taking them home. Locked in the cab with no means of escape, the driver transports the couple to a stretch of deserted and supposedly haunted road. But what is his purpose? Is he mad or just plain evil? And why has he selected Anne and Patrick as his victims?

REVIEW: Most of us have had a less-than-enjoyable ride in a cab or an Uber. At least with rideshares, you can tell if the driver has been a creep or not, while a taxi is a complete crapshoot. Jumping into a cab, we generally trust that we are safe, but everyone knows someone who has a horror story about a nightmare ride. The new film Black Cab takes that idea and twists it for an unconventional ghost story involving a nameless driver and a young couple stuck in the backseat for a terrifying journey. With a rare dramatic performance from Nick Frost, Black Cab may not be nearly as scary as it could have been, but the lead role of the Shaun of the Dead actor makes up for the film’s shortcomings. With a brisk running time and some tricks up its sleeve, Black Cab is worth checking out.

Black Cab opens with Anne (Synnove Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris) leaving a get-together with friends, and they reveal that they have recently gotten back together. The group’s mixed feelings at hearing the news throw a wrench in the shared ride home that they take in a typical British black cab. Driven by an unnamed but jovial driver (Nick Frost), the cab begins its commute with Anne and Patrick bickering about their reunion as a couple. The driver tries to lighten the mood by chatting up the young passengers, with Anne being quietly nice and Patrick acting like the worst fare. Rather quickly, the ride escalates as the couple’s argument shifts toward the driver, who makes repeated insults towards Patrick and several detours along the way. When they make one particular stop, things turn for the worse.

At first, Black Cab has the hallmarks of countless horror films about kidnappings and maniacs who take advantage of unsuspecting civilians. Echoing elements of The Hitcher and even The Vanishing, Black Cab starts out as an unsettlingly realistic thriller about what could happen if you set foot in an average taxi cab. Nick Frost’s performance begins with his sense of humor, making the driver seem like an average guy behind the wheel, making either groanworthy comments in their dad-jokiness or slightly off from what you would expect in a normal conversation. Frost does a great job of shifting his demeanor from awkward to friendly and suddenly to sinister and menacing without missing a beat, giving the driver an air of psychopathy that makes it difficult to know if he is crazy or just incredibly calculating. That is until the film shifts into the final act.

Without giving away the reveal/twist as to why the driver has taken Anne and Patrick hostage, I will say that it did not completely work for me. It does help shift your perspective as to why the driver does what he does, but it also changes the dynamic of what kind of a movie Black Cab is. The sequences outside of the cab offer a nice change of pace, but I was hopeful that Black Cab would mimic the single-location conceit of Steven Knight’s Locke rather than follow a more conventional genre route. Even so, the beats that Black Cab hits as it presses through the third act towards the ending did not entirely work for me outside of Nick Frost’s performance. By playing the driver as an everyman, Frost imbues elements of his physicality that could have you underestimate that this cabbie is capable of what he does over the course of the film, but without Frost’s charisma and presence, I don’t think this movie would have worked at all.

Written by Virgina Gilbert, Black Cab does boast some script work from Nick Frost himself. The nature of Frost’s character required his input, as I cannot imagine the role would have worked as well without his involvement in the dialogue. Gilbert has scripted and directed several films heavy in character drama rather than the supernatural. Still, director Bruce Goodison invests his visual style and approach to Black Cab in the tried and true of the genre. From jumpscares to the dimly lit sets, Goodison mines tropes from countless horror movies that came before it, which detracts a bit from the originality of what Nick Frost’s character brings to the tale. It is not a terrible horror film, but it certainly does not innovate much in the genre.

Black Cab would have been a forgettable horror movie without Nick Frost’s lead performance. As an unhinged driver with a supernatural mission, Black Cab is the actor’s third horror film of the year and one of the better performances of his career. When a film entirely hinges on a single performance, you know that there is something special about it. Nick Frost may be most associated with the lighter and more humorous genre outings in his filmography, but Black Cab proves that he is more than up to the task of playing dead serious dramatic roles. This is not a terrible movie or a great one, but Nick Frost makes it destination viewing with a charismatic and creepy lead performance.

Black Cab begins streaming on November 8th on Shudder.

Black Cab

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