Directed by Brad Baruh and Meghan Leon
Written by Meghan Leon
Starring Sophie Dalah, AJ Bowen
Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes
In theaters, digital and VOD August 6

by Nikk Nelson, Staff Writer

I’ve had to preface several reviews lately with a preamble. I think I’ve lived too long and seen too many movies. A movie, especially one with a familiar premise, has to do something really different in order to impress me. In the first hour of Meghan Leon and Brad Baruh’s Night Drive (2021), there wasn’t a lot that impressed me, other than the performances, particularly Sophie Dalah as Charlotte. Her character, however, a sociopathic, desensitized, nihilistic young woman who is chronically unimpressed even in the most horrific of circumstances, has been played out at this point. The same goes for the initial plot. There is a brief moment in the opening of the film, after being introduced to polite, mild-mannered, gig-economy driver Russell, played by AJ Bowen, where I thought, given the title, as soon as the sun went down, some sort of switch was going to flip and Russell was going to transform into a badass werewolf serial killer killer. No such luck.

Instead, we’re taken on a ride that, between, just to name a few, Blood Simple (1984), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Very Bad Things (1998), and Collateral (2004), feels exhaustively mundane. Driver drives, picks up an eccentric, interesting person, and they hit someone. “Oh, fuck, was that a person?!” Now there’s a body. They gotta get rid of the body. But wait. It’s not what you think. To be honest, I checked out around the time of the “go to the hardware store because you need supplies to get rid of a body” scene. However, I checked back in, hard, at minute fifty-five and since the twist is what makes the entire movie different and interesting, I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say, it fits the story perfectly. The thing I appreciated most about it was that it actually leant some reasoning, finally, to Charlotte’s character other than her nihilism being an inherent symptom in post-post modernism.

The film ultimately wins me over with the ‘it starts out as one thing but becomes another’ a la From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) but I think if the twist had come at the halfway mark, the overall experience would have benefited tremendously. There are some funny and gory moments that teased the horror fan out of me. There’s solid chemistry between the two leads and the film is composed and shot adeptly. I really enjoyed the music that played over the end credits—it almost invites you to consider that maybe you just finished watching a frosted-tips teen comedy circa 2003. I think if these filmmakers hit on a similar idea in the future but execute it just a hair differently, we’re going to see something that’s very original and a lot of fun. I look forward to it.