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Alison (Lizzie Zerebko) once worked as an architect, but an affair with
her boss got her fired, and now to make ends meet she drives for a
rideshare company - and the last passenger for the night (Michael Olavson)
sure freaks her out as he's clearly not the person in the picture of his
passenger profile, and only has a flimsy excuse as to why, he evades all
questions about himself, and music gives him nausea. So at a stop when
he's going for a pee, she goes through his things and finds lots of
jewelry that obviously isn't his, and some of it covered in blood, and a
gun. Of course, that makes Alison nervous, so she fakes a car malfunction
and while pretending to take a look at the engine calls a friend for
backup - too late it seems as he catches her on the phone and forces her
to drive on. Then she sees him brandishing the gun in the back seat, grabs
it - and in a moment of distraction runs over a man (Kevin Morgan), who
dies in the process. She wants to call the police, but he convinces her
that this would destroy her as she'd be convicted of manslaughter, but
offers to help her make the dead body disappear - if only she drives him
to his destination first ... which turns out to be a drug den. There
though, Alison witnesses her passenger to perform professional first aid
on a girl almost dying from an overdose, and her views on him change.
Driving on, they finally have a heart-to-heart and Alison learns her
passenger's a paramedic who, to make ends meet, has made it his habit to
steal jewelry from the dead. And he went to the drug den to buy not quite
legal pain blockers for himself. And he helps her just because she needs
helped. So flawed as he might be, he's a good guy, essentially. What
Alison and her passenger don't know is that a cop (Ryan Forrestal) who has
found massive amounts of blood and a show on the scene of their accident
is now investigating this as a murder case, and slowly but surely he gets
closer and closer, until he stops Alison's car and demands for her to open
the trunk where the dead body's stored. In the meantime, checking the dead
man's cellphone, the passenger makes a disquieting discovery - when a
gunshot is fired ... Now this is basically a
pretty cool, character-driven thriller that gets the most out of its
situation, and even its main, very confined location, and plays its
emotional registers to the hilt - but in a way that always remains
believable and even relatable. This is of course also helped by its two
very solid leads, while a dynamic directorial effort keeps the tension
high throughout, and favouring suspense over spectacle sees to it that the
movie never topples over towards the ridiculous. And the reveal in the
third act that totally turns everything that happened before onto its head
deserves special praise as closing out an already strong genre movie on a
high note.
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