Grimmfest 2024 – Black Cab ★★★

Released: 8 November 2024 (Shudder)

Director: Bruce Goodison

Starring: Nick Frost, Synnove Karlsen, Luke Norris

Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab, which premiered at GrimmFest 2024, is a Manchester-set horror film that smartly utilises its star actor within its especially eerie form of psychological horror. Award-winning actor Nick Frost needs no introduction to horror fans. He has had roles in some of the UK’s most memorable horror comedies, including Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013). Black Cab allows Frost to experiment with a role which isn’t that of the loveable sidekick whose main job is to lighten a horror film’s darker moments.  Frost plays a cab driver whose psychopathic tendencies become apparent when he picks up Anne and Patrick, an unhappy couple played with compelling sympathy by Synnove Karlsen and Luke Norris.

Anne and Patrick are wrestling with the challenges of early adult life. The prospect of marriage is daunting for them. Patrick is something of a chauvinist. He is both dismissive of Anne’s feelings and callous, provoking concerns from Anne’s friends who know secrets about Patrick which make them think Anne marrying him would be a bad idea. When Anne and Patrick hail an anonymous black cab after a fraught night out with friends, their driver, played with contagious energy by Frost, is friendly and upbeat. He makes inane small talk and asks chatty questions even when it is clear that the couple are in no mood to humour him.

Black Cab begins as a dark comedy of manners, with Anne and Patrick seemingly trapped in an irritating and familiar social situation. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Their driver’s humdrum conversation quickly turns into something much more sinister and darker. There is a pivotal moment in Black Cab when it becomes clear that Anne and Patrick are no longer passengers but are abductees, a moment that makes your stomach drop. It delves deep into its characters and offers intensely claustrophobic moments that move from tense to gut-wrenching in a matter of seconds.

Billed as a supernatural horror, Black Cab is most memorable as a psychological horror film. Frost keeps up a steady beat of light-hearted, chatty dialogue throughout these transformative scenes that dramatically change the tone of the film within the space of a few seconds. This moment of transformation, as the film shifts into obvious horror territory, demands a fair bit of work from its actors. Anne especially is on the receiving end of the darker side of Frost’s cab driver who draws the couple into his own twisted psychological world which has been ruptured by grief and loss.

Goodison enhances the unnerving atmosphere of Black Cab with a selection of eerie filming locations ranging from the streets of inner-city Manchester to rural woodlands on the edge of Bolton. The contrast between the opening scenes, set in the bustling nightlife of Castlefield and the city centre, and the later, atmospheric scenes in rural woodlands that nod to familiar tropes of British folk horror. In folk horror, darkened woodlands and rural landscapes play host to all sorts of hauntings and rituals – a set of conventions that Black Cab plays upon as it reaches its climax.

There is also a supernatural side to Black Cab that makes it clear the three people in the cab are not the only ones being drawn into this dark and violent story. The cab is plagued by a ghostly presence whose significance in the twisted turn of events becomes more apparent as the film progresses. Opinions may be divided about exactly how frightening or intriguing the supernatural element of the film is to audiences. The ghost’s presence isconjured on-screen through digital effects, interspersed into scenes at moments that undermine the pace of the dialogue between Frost and his passengers-turned-victims. At its weakest, the tense pace of Black Cab‘s screenplay is overcomplicated by too many psychological and supernatural elements. The plot would have benefitted from being more streamlined as a character study of the psychopathic tendencies of its villain.

Nevertheless, Black Cab is anchored by Frost’s performance who plays his character as a passionate and expressive villain. Frost’s performance is the film’s key strength, along with a poignant performance from Synnove Karlsen as Anne who begins the film as an energy-sapped woman grounded down by life and her relationship with Patrick. She changes over the course of the film as Frost’s brutal treatment causes her to become resourceful in a fight for survival. The dynamic between these two main actors drives the action in the film, and their double act underpins the main scares in Black Cab.

Black Cab begins as a social satire that is both darkly funny and unsettling in ways that get under the viewer’s skin. It then burrows deeper and deeper until it turns into a sharply uncomfortable and, eventually, terrifying watch. Frost is the lead of a very capable cast with the talent to keep the tension going throughout most of Black Cab, with sensitive performances that balance jump scares with sympathy.