If you’ve ever had to sit through a cab journey with an obnoxious driver (and if you’ve ever taken a cab, then the chances are you have), spare a thought for Anne (Synnove Karlsen). She’s already having a bad night, which is clear from the lack of enthusiasm with which she announces her engagement to her moody, controlling and at times tedious partner, Patrick (Luke Norris). But she little realises that this awkward dinner is going to be the high point of her night, because she’s going home with the Taxi Driver From Hell, played wonderfully by Nick Frost.
At first, the driver is merely overfriendly to the point of rudeness, enquiring about the intimate details of Anne and Patrick’s lives, offering unasked-for opinions, and perhaps most egregiously, stopping to make a phone call and leaving the meter running. But this is a horror-thriller, so of course he’s going to become increasingly sinister as the journey wears on; most viewers will have guessed this anyway from the splendidly sinister poster. Soon enough, he’s taking Anne and Patrick away from the agreed drop-off and onto, he claims, the most haunted road in England. Spooky!
At this point, sadly, the film starts to lose some of its momentum. Nick Frost, much-beloved for comedy performances in Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and even some projects without comedy partner Simon Pegg, becomes the latest of a long line of comedic, or otherwise loveable, actors shedding that image with a deeply sinister performance: see John Jarratt in Wolf Creek, Robin Williams in One Hour Photo, Hugh Grant in Heretic, et cetera. It’s a tried-and-tested formula, and why not? It always seem to work, and this is no exception. Frost easily captures a type of character we’ve all met, cheerfully ignorant, blithely tedious, and nursing a subtle inferiority-superiority complex.
Unfortunately, the film surrounding that performance isn’t worthy of it. After a strong first act, supernatural elements which were previously only hinted begin to take over the plot, the taut and tense psycho thriller stalling out as it reprises The Woman in Black to lesser effect.
★★☆☆☆