SELF DRIVER (2024) Fantaspoa 2024

Desperate to make money a cab driver signs up to be part of a fleet of drivers using a new app. The trick is that in order to make money you must follow its directions and do so within its time frame.

This is an okay drama/thriller/dark comedy that suffers from the limitations imposed it via the low budget and that almost the entire film is inside the car. I don't blame actor Nathanael Chadwick who is in pretty much every shot of the film. Yes, the film is his story, but at the same time writer director Michael Pierro never makes us feel as though there is any connection to the world at large or anything beyond the same repeated angles. The repeated angles is understandable but the sense of the cab operating in any sort of world is never really established. It might have worked if the app didn't seem to be more deus ex machina where it should have been something closer to real. I never felt this was anything other than a movie.

And please forgive me for complaining about the lack of the cab being connected to the world but there have been a number of recent films set almost entirely in cabs or cars over the last few years and they largely played better because there were attempts to put the cab into a real world. 

To be honest I would be curious what Pierro will do when he doesn't tie himself to a single location.

As this stands, SELF DRIVER is a missed connection.