Having just lost his office job, being faced with debt and having a wife (Sasha Gaponovitch) and newbown qhild to take care of, D (Nathanael Chadwick) has found himself to become a night cabbie, just to make ends meet - and he has hated every minute since, with the lousy pay not being any consolation of course. And then he meets Nic (Adam Goldhammer), a passenger who claims to have launched his own cab app, and he desperately needs drivers, drivers like D - and he offers pay per night D nowadays doesn't make in a week. And as before long the night gets really shitty, it doesn't take D long to accept - even if the pay alone makes him doubt the legality of Nic's company. But hey, all D has to do is follow the company app to wherever it might take him and not ask any questions, so where can be the harm in that. D's first passenger is a girl dressed like an angel (Catt Filippov) whom he drives into a really seedy part of town where she might not be safe on her own. She asks him to wait while she enters a run-down building, but ultimately the app asks him to go on, and while he feels guilty for abandonng the girl, he can't afford to lose this job for his wife and child's sake. His next job is driving a drug pusher (Christian Aldo) around who by the look of it uses him a getaway driver. Next is a dishevelled man (Harold Tausch) the app tells him to beat to a pulp - and he has no choice but to do it. Finally, there's a good looking couple (Reece Presley, Lauren Welchner), whose ploy it is to offer drunk girls they pick off the streets a ride home, then drug them and sell them into white slavery. And that's when D slowly but surely develops a guilty conscience ...

Sure, the plot of this movie as such is a bit on the far-fetched side of things, but at the same time there's a certain truth to it, not so much in any plot details but in a social commentary way that shows how far a man can be pushed convincing himself he's "just following orders". What makes thig concept work though is the fact that the protagonist is actually a down-on-his-luck but caring husband and father whose fate is at least to some extent relatable to all of us. And that Nathanael Chadwick plays him with just the right kind of vulnerability of course helps bringing this across. But said, this movie doesn't give its subject matter the philosophical but the thriller treatment and is written and directed in a genre savvy way with an emphasis on suspense while really gettzing the most out of the film's very limited locations. And the result then is a pretty good and pretty intelligent piece of genre entertainment.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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