If you’ve ever had a taxi ride so awkward you were convinced you might actually die before your stop, Black Cab is that feeling stretched into 88 minutes of tense, supernatural misery—in a good way.
Bruce Goodison’s 2024 shocker takes the most mundane urban ritual—getting a cab home after a rowdy night out—and turns it into a psychological haunting where the meter’s running, the doors are locked, and your driver knows way too much about your trauma.
A Night Out, a Bad Relationship, and the Cab from Hell
Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris) are not what you’d call #relationshipgoals. They’re the couple at the restaurant you feel sorry for: brittle smiles, simmering resentment, and the kind of tension that makes the cutlery nervous. After a disastrous night that dredges up grief and infidelity and all the other greatest hits of emotional damage, they do what Brits do best: avoid talking about it and get a taxi.
Enter Ian, their black cab driver, played by Nick Frost. At first, he’s chatty, affable, and almost painfully normal—exactly the kind of bloke you’d expect to complain about football and petrol prices. But when Anne and Patrick realise he’s not taking them home, and the doors mysteriously won’t open, the film quietly shifts from domestic drama into captivity horror with a supernatural twist.
It’s every city-dweller’s fear: you get in the wrong cab, and suddenly you’re not a passenger—you’re cargo.
Nick Frost, But Make It Menacing
Casting Nick Frost as the villain is the movie’s biggest gamble and its biggest win. We’re so used to seeing him as lovable comic relief from the Cornetto Trilogy days that watching him play someone genuinely threatening feels… wrong, in a deeply enjoyable way.
Ian starts off as “classic Nick Frost”: warm, funny, slightly awkward. You almost trust him more than you trust Patrick, which is saying something. Then the mask slips—very slowly. His banter gets more invasive, his questions too personal, his cheerfulness stretched just a bit too tight. By the time he’s driving the couple down a deserted, supposedly haunted road that seems to loop back on itself, you’re not sure whether you’re dealing with a psychopath, a medium, or some kind of metaphysical Uber from the afterlife.
Frost never goes full cartoon villain; he just lets the charm curdle. It’s like watching your favourite bartender slowly reveal he’s been reading your diary for years.
Haunted Road, Haunted People
The real genius of Black Cab is that it never lets you forget the couple were already in trouble before the horror even started. Anne and Patrick are grieving parents whose relationship has been rotting ever since the loss of their child—something the film reveals in layers rather than dumping all at once.
That grief saturates everything: the stiff small talk, the bursts of cruelty, the pregnant pauses where they could say something meaningful and absolutely do not. The haunted road Ian takes them to feels less like a place on a map and more like a physical manifestation of their unresolved guilt.
And then there are the apparitions. Shadows flit across the empty tarmac. Strange figures appear in the headlights. A childlike presence—Tilly Woodward’s “Ghost”—seems to flicker in and out of reality, as if the road itself is replaying old tragedies on a loop.
The supernatural here isn’t just tacked on for jump scares; it grows from the emotional rot at the story’s core. The horror is less “boo, ghost!” and more “you never dealt with this, so now the universe is driving you straight into it.”
Small Cast, Big Pressure Cooker
With such a limited cast, the film lives and dies on performances, and thankfully this cab is well-staffed. Synnøve Karlsen is quietly fantastic as Anne: fragile but not weak, exhausted but not empty. She doesn’t play a Final Girl so much as a woman who’s run out of places to shove her pain.
Luke Norris gives Patrick just enough charm that you understand why Anne ever loved him, and just enough nastiness that you understand why she might also want to shove him into oncoming traffic. Their arguments feel horribly real—no melodramatic screaming, just sharp, emotionally petty jabs that clearly have years of history behind them.
And then there are the supporting players: Tessa Parr and George Bukhari as friends who see red flags long before Anne does, and Tilly Woodward as the spectral child whose presence keeps blurring the line between memory and haunting. They’re used sparingly but effectively, like emotional jump cuts that remind you these people had lives before this cab ride started turning into a séance on wheels.
Minimalist Horror That Actually Uses Its Budget
At 88 minutes, Black Cab is refreshingly lean. There’s no filler, no side quests, no tedious detours to explain the entire metaphysics of Ghost Uber. Goodison keeps the camera mostly locked into tight, claustrophobic spaces—the cab interior, the road, small pockets of darkness just outside the headlights’ reach.
The result is a horror film that feels bigger than its budget because it never tries to show you more than it can convincingly pull off. You don’t need an army of CGI spectres when one figure on a lonely road at 3 a.m. can make you want to uninstall your eyes.
The cinematography leans hard into Manchester’s night gloom and the eerie isolation of the supposedly haunted stretch, while the sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting: engine hums, wipers squeak, faint whispers under the radio static. Gazelle Twin’s score adds this unnerving electronic pulse that makes the whole ride feel like a panic attack with a rhythm section.
Supernatural… or Just Super Messed-Up?
One of the film’s best tricks is its refusal to fully explain itself. Reviews have rightly noted that the ending is ambiguous, and that’s not critic code for “we didn’t get it,” it’s the point.
Is Ian in league with something on that road? Is he exploiting Anne and Patrick’s emotional vulnerability to make them see things? Are the apparitions tied to their dead child, or to past passengers, or to Ian himself?
You get hints, glimpses, implications—but no neat lore dump. For some viewers, that’ll be frustrating. For others, it’s exactly the right move: trauma doesn’t arrive with a handbook, and neither do ghosts.
From a darkly comic angle, it’s also kind of perfect that after all that dread, all that metaphysical buildup, you still can’t quite decide if you were just trapped with one very broken man… or hitchhiking with the supernatural.
A Ride Worth Taking (Just Not in Real Life)
Look, Black Cab isn’t reinventing horror. The “kidnapper with a vehicle” setup is as old as roads, and grief as a ghost engine is now practically its own subgenre. The story does occasionally lurch between psychological drama and ghost train, and if you’re the type who needs every spectral beat fully explained, you may step out of this cab with more questions than answers.
But the film has three huge things going for it:
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A killer central performance from Nick Frost, who turns “nice bloke cabbie” into something genuinely unnerving.
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A tightly focused, claustrophobic setup that makes the most of one location and a handful of characters.
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An emotional backbone built on grief, guilt, and the horrible things people do to each other long before any ghosts get involved.
It’s moody without being sluggish, spooky without needing a jump scare every five minutes, and just nasty enough to stick in your head the next time you’re in the back of a cab and the driver misses your turn.
If you like your horror small, mean, and fuelled by bad decisions and worse secrets, Black Cab is absolutely worth flagging down. Just remember: always check the license plate… and maybe avoid any driver who seems a little toointerested in your relationship problems.
