This review was made possible by an advance screener of Black Cab. Black Cab premieres on Shudder on Friday, November 8th (my birthday!).

When Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris) hail a black cab after a night out their driver (Nick Frost) 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?

Bruce Goodison has established himself as one of the country’s leading drama directors, behind series as diverse as RTS and BAFTA nominee “Our World War,” ITV’s hit series “Home Fires,” BBC1’s “Doctor Foster” and Murdered by My Father. “Born to Kill” for World Productions/C4, “Anne” for World / ITV, and Then Barbara Met Alan for Netflix/BBC. Following directing Nick Frost in the film Black Cab, he is slated to write and direct his third feature Girl Next Door to feature Bella Ramsey. Bruce has won two RTS awards, a BAFTA, a Broadcast Award, a Grierson and has been nominated three times for a BAFTA and once for an Emmy.

Black Cab is one of the newest Shudder offerings, and it stars one of my favorite performers, Nick Frost! Now, seeing that Frost–widely known as a star of comedies–was taking a prominent role in a Shudder movie–Shudder is typically a horror-forward streaming service–threw me for a loop, but I’ve seen horror-comedies on the service before. Hell, Frost has starred in horror-comedies before!

But make no mistake, Black Cab is a straight-ahead horror effort with little humor to be found. It tells the tale of Ann, a pregnant single woman who is being pressured by her boyfriend to move in with him and get married… and he doesn’t even know she is carrying his baby yet. Patrick is a total ass who no viewer should want to see get together with Ann, but early on, the two are picked up by Ian, a taxi driver who had previously driven Ann home from the hospital and knows she is with child.

Ian spills the beans about the baby, causing more friction between Ann and Patrick. But that’s not the worst he does, as he tells them a story about a haunted hitchhiker and then abducts them!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Nick Frost is excellent, as always. He carries the movie, probably delivering 70%+ of the dialogue in the whole flick. He’s typically not thought of as a guy who puts a flick on his back and carries it–all these years later, he’s still viewed as Simon Pegg’s partner in crime–but he definitely has his working boots on in this one.

He’s also far more menacing than I would have ever thought given the movies from his resume that I have seen. But he plays a right proper asshole in Black Cab, a guy who can effortlessly shift between being deceptively calm and friendly and then being over-the-top aggressive and violent. It’s a performance that really lets all aspects of his actin talent shine through.

He’s not totally a revelation in this movie–we’v all known of him and his comedic chops for years–but getting to show leading man and horror abilities is seemingly new for him, and it all really works.

+ There’s a nifty blend of terror that could exist in the real world with a touch of the supernatural here, and it creates a duel sense of dread that you don’t get too often. Most of the time, films try to pick one lane and stay in it: either there is realistic horror, a la something like The Strangers, or there is a paranormal element, like you might find in The Conjuring universe. Black Cab eschews that entirely and throws in a bit of both.

It works because it creates an added layer of dread overall to the movie. Ann might be able to escape one peril, but can she survive two? Are they both even threats? Is one more friendly than the other? Are they somehow working together? There’s all of these questions and other aspects to consider when Ann has more than one obstacle in front of her.

– I personally call this Down The Pig Effect because every time I think a film suffers from this particular problem, it reminds me of the Nicholas Cage vehicle about a man searching for his kidnapped pet. What it is is this: this nearly 90 minute movie would have made a really good sub-60 minute movie. 

Black Cab drags at points, and you can tell there is some runtime padding going on with various scenes here, like the one where Ann asks Ian if she can go to the bathroom, or the scene where Ian pulls over to get a snack. Neither of those added much to the movie, and you could easily have left them on the editing room floor to get a tighter cinematic experience.

Unfortunately, movies seem allergic to even considering running shorter than 80 minutes these days, so you get decent short ideas that are stretched out past where they should be. And Black Cab absolutely suffers from that.

– After meandering around for over an hour, the last fifteen minutes or so gets a bit messy and rushes through matters. I didn’t have a huge dilemma over it, but my wife did, as she was left with a lot of questions when it was all said and done. She did not feel it had a satisfying conclusion. And I can see her point.

Everything with Ann and Ian and the hitchhiking ghost all comes together, and characters get separated from each other, and it becomes hard to figure out who is where in conjunction to whom… it’s all a bit much. How did certain things happen? Did they happen before or after others? In its rush to scrape everything up, Black Cab doesn’t do a very neat job. 

OVERALL

Nick Frost is the stand-out here, and he’s the reason to check out Black Cab. You’re unlikely to have seen a performance like this from him before! But when you get past the effectiveness and novelty of that, you are left with a middling tale that runs too long and then has a sloppy resolution. Frost’s work really deserved a better effort around him. 

Three Stars Out Of Five