Sometimes all you need to make a good story work is a confined space and a couple of really good actors. Black Cab, the latest Shudder film to get a Blu-ray release so that those who don't subscribe to the streaming service can get a chance to watch it, tries this by putting its two leads into a London black cab and ramping the tension up; however, thanks to a fairly lacklustre script there's little here to keep you engaged other than Nick Frost's charm (please note, this review was written before Nick Frost was announced to be in the new Harry Potter television series).
Black Cab follows Anne (Synnøve Karlsen), a young woman dealing with the stress of her unstable relationship with a boyfriend, Patrick (Luke Norris), who looks to be an abusive womaniser. Anne is dealing with the uncertainty of their relationship, her pregnancy, and the ghost that's following her and giving her strange nightmares about a black cab. The early scenes have an almost Where's Wally? thing going on with the ghostly figure as you catch small glimpses of her in reflective surfaces, or see fading handprints she leaves behind on things.
After an awkward dinner with some friends, where Patrick tells shitty stories, gets very drunk, and announces that he and Anne are engaged (seemingly something even Anne didn't know), the two of them jump in the back of a black cab driven by Ian (Nick Frost). At first Ian seems to be a decent guy, even offering to throw Patrick out for Anne, sensing the tension between the two of them. Bombarding them with stories, a running commentary, and even joining in with songs on the radio, Ian comes across as the embodiment of the overly talkative London cabbie. It's when he mentions having recently picked up Anne from the hospital maternity ward that things begin to take a turn, having just accidentally revealed to Patrick that Anne is pregnant.
However, this awkward moment is quickly overshadowed when Ian, who's pretending to need to get a map from the back of the cab, attacks the young couple with a stun gun, knocking Patrick unconscious. With Anne and Patrick zip-tied in the back of the cab, Ian starts a journey to a distant stretch of supposedly haunted road, where he needs Anne and her unborn baby to make a deal.
Black Cab doesn't have a bad premise, on paper at least. Being a young pregnant woman trapped in the rear of a vehicle driven by a madman with a weapon and some strange agenda for you is a pretty frightening concept, one that leans into very real fears that a lot of women have to deal with on an almost everyday basis. However, the film never really does much beyond this initial concept. The movie toys with the supernatural throughout, yet doesn't really commit to it until the final act, and by then it's been used so sparsely that it almost feels a bit ridiculous when the film makes one of its main characters a ghost.
It also doesn't help that two thirds of its main cast, Anne and Patrick, feel very underdeveloped. Patrick spends much of the movie unconscious, and as such you either forget he's there, or think of him as little more than an annoying prick boyfriend. This is fine in a way, as the film isn't really about him, and despite being there for much of the film he's little more than a supporting character. But even then, I'm finding it hard to describe his character in any great detail. He's fairly shallow, with a surface level character trait that never gets expanded upon. If he was the only one it might not stand out so much, but the fact that Anne, our lead character, is similar in a lot of ways, makes it feel less of an importance thing, and more that the writing is just pretty weak.
Anne's character can be summed up very simply as 'frightened victim', with little else to her. Whether that's her being scared around her partner, or terrified that Ian is going to kill her, she spends much of the film being scared. You might be asking what's wrong with that, she is a female lead in a horror film after all, that's what most of them do, but when compared to other final girls it's shockingly clear that Anne has no character. Compared to Sarah Connor, Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott, or Ellen Ripley, all of whom have strong characters and interesting arcs in their first films, Anne falls pretty flat. I feel bad in saying that, as Karlsen does a decent job throughout, and comes across as a very charming person, but it's more of a lack of material she has to work with rather than any lack of acting ability.
The only character who seems to have any real presence is Ian, and I can't help but feel that much of this comes down to Nick Frost over the actual script. Frost is able to make himself very charming when needed, and he injects a lot of humour into various moments in the film too, simply from how he puts certain inflection into lines that could have been delivered much more normally. It's not hard to watch half of his scenes and think that another actor would be delivering a much less interesting performance. He's able to make you like Ian very quickly, and there are several moments even after he's revealed he's the villain of the piece where you kind of still like him. The times where the charm drops and he turns sinister are much more impactful because of this too, and it's often quite shocking when the jovial cab driver suddenly screams at Anne, threatening to harm her. In many ways Nick Frost carries this film, and if it wasn't for his performance it would be hard to enjoy much of the movie.
Black Cab is a fairly short film, yet feels overly long when you're watching it. This comes down to the weird pacing that it has, and the fact that not a huge amount happens for the first hour. Little time is given over to character development, and plot seems to just circle around for a while. Thinking back on the movie it feels like a concept for a short film that was stretched out into a feature length piece, one that didn't have enough material to make that change feel worthwhile or substantial.
It's not just the film that feels lacking, sadly, as the Blu-ray release comes with nothing but a behind the scenes photo gallery as it's extra features. The lack of anything like trailers, interviews, behind the scenes making of pieces, or commentaries, makes the physical release feel kind of cheap, and as if no real care was put into making it. For those who don't have Shudder and see a Black Cab sitting on shop shelves and find their interest piqued by a Nick Frost horror film (as mine was initially), perhaps wait until the film is in the bargain bin, as the way it is at the moment it feels like the full asking price is much steeper than it should be.
Black Cab is available no on both DVD and Blu-ray.
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