BLACK CAB - Mark Reviews Movies

Black Cab, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2024

Two urban legends figure into the story of Black Cab. The distinction between why each one is—or supposedly is—scary gets at the miscalculation of Virgina Gilbert's screenplay.

The first rumored tale is mentioned in passing here. You'll probably know it if you've spent any time telling scary stories in the dark with a group of people. In it, a woman is driving home at night, minding her own business, when she notices a car following her. The pursuing driver starts flashing the headlights, honking the horn, and becoming more aggressive, and terrified of what the other driver wants to do to her, the woman races home.

The final twist of the tale is that the driver isn't a threat. Indeed, he's trying to warn the woman of the knife-wielding man he spotted in the backseat of her car.

Why is this urban legend important to note in detail? For one thing, Gilbert's script does, as protagonists Anne (Synnove Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris) have dinner with a couple of friends, one of whom relates the story as having happened to a friend of a relative, as seems to be the case with all these kinds of stories. For another, the creepy tale sets up a certain expectation about what the filmmakers believe to be frightening. It's in a situation that seems perfectly ordinary and believable but becomes something entirely unexpected.

The threat of that story is tangible, though, and at first, the threat of director Bruce Goodison's movie is, too. He's a seemingly random cab driver, played by Nick Frost, who picks up Anne and Patrick from the restaurant, starts driving them home, and soon reveals that he has other, nefarious things in mind. It's an everyday scenario, twisted into a nightmare.

There's a lot of promise in the premise, in the other words, because one could imagine it happening to oneself—or the friend of a distant relative, for that matter. That the whole story unfolds on a rainy night, as the cabbie and his abducted passengers drive through long stretches of open road and make occasional stops in places where no other people are to be found, is exactly the atmosphere one expects within an urban legend—or as the backdrop for someone telling that kind of story.

To get at why the movie soon collapses, though, is to bring up the other tale featured here, which becomes the bulk of the plot. That one involves the ghost of a woman, who could be found standing like an ordinary hitchhiker on some desolate stretch of road. It's not until someone picks her up, though, that the truth of her ghostly nature becomes apparent. That urban legend always felt like a copout, since nothing really happens in it and the fright is entirely dependent on one's belief that the ghost of a dead woman would spend eternity hanging out on the side of the road, just to make kindly people feel a bit uncomfortable.

How that legend does fit into Gilbert's screenplay is, well, like that, too. It comes out of nowhere, doesn't really lead anywhere, and assumes we'll find it scarier than the real, physical threat of a driver who is capable of harming his passengers and has some devious plan for them in mind. The vague menace of a real person is generally more frightening than the vague motives of a ghost. Frost's cabbie is creepy, because the actor combines a strange sense of humor, apology, and desperation to the character. The ghost is meant to be creepy, simply because it pops into frame every so often.

One of these things is very much not like the other, and the filmmakers have gambled that the ghost story is more compelling, unsettling, and worth exploring than the initial setup they provide. It's a bad bet.

It's also a shaky foundation for storytelling, because the movie simply doesn't seem to know what to do with either of its antagonists. They're just too different, because one is real and the other is a literal phantom, and the introduction of the hitchhiking ghost, as an entity that has haunted the cab driver and essentially gives him a reason to abduct Anne and Patrick, makes the first villain into a passive figure. He's as along for the ride, basically, as his captives, and that also means he seems to be making up his plan as he goes. The screenplay itself certainly seems to be making up its back story, plot, and threat as it goes.

That makes the cabbie less scary, to be sure, and it makes the whole of movie far sillier than the grounded setup makes it originally appear. The supernatural surely has its place in horror, but when given the option between a man with a knife and a ghost that might startle someone every so often, only one of those is genuinely scary. Black Cab makes the wrong choice.

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