Written and directed by Bertie and Samantha Speirs, “Midnight Taxi” (2024) revolves around the life of a cab driver, Eddie Carter (played by Ladi Emeruwa). He drives around London at night, giving us a glimpse into all the kinds of passengers he comes across during these hours of the day when the city has mostly fallen asleep. However, one night, he happens to doze off in his car and wakes up to find a dead woman lying on the road, her hands tied up behind her, in front of him.
Although he reports it to the police, Eddie cannot shake off an eerie feeling about this incident, experiencing a bunch of nightmares featuring this dead woman, and he sets out on a desperate search for the killer of this anonymous woman. In the process, he discovers that he suffers from somnambulism (read: sleeping walking) and London’s seedy underbelly of crimes. Possibly the best thing about this crime thriller is that it leaves you tied down to your seat, playing a cat-and-mouse chase with the protagonist till the very end.
You can see the kind of technical effort that has gone into making this film, considering the budgetary constraints. Mostly shot inside a black electric cab that drives around some of the most iconic London locations at night, with Emeruwa in the driver’s seat, you can almost feel the humdrum of a cabbie’s life. It partly reminds you of the quotidian life that Adam Driver’s titular character, a NJ transit driver, leads in Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” (2016). Eddie meets so many kinds of passengers along the way, some chirpy and some rude, that this slice-of-life presentation becomes an important marker for setting up the exposition in the film. This also makes the scenario – finding a dead body on the street – very fathomable, as if it could happen to anyone during any of their night shifts, thus serving as an impressive hook for the audience.
Further, as we are led into Eddie’s desperate and amateur investigation into this crime, you slowly start to realize a hint of an unreliable narrator, especially as Eddie seems to have gotten his days and nights all jumbled up due to somnambulism. The use of jump cuts and rapid editing in their film really helps keep up with the pace of the story despite its laid-back, night-time setting. The Speirs can really tell a story; I must give them that!
However, once you start to look away from the finer details that make up the plot, including Eddie frustratingly trying to reach the customer support of the cab service he works for, you see that the plot is paper thin and not more than a few pages long. Inevitably, the initial rhythm starts to feel slowed down by the end of the first forty-five minutes. This would have made for a fantastic, almost-feature-length short film, but “Midnight Taxi” (2024) really starts to take a toll on your interest in the story before you arrive at the third act.
Besides, the nightmares are conceptualized as a mix of Eleven’s visions from the Netflix TV show “Stranger Things” (2016 – ) and the “Insidious” movie franchise. The void and the presence of just the concerned human beings in the frame contribute to making the nightmare neither trippy nor persuasive in its intent. If anything, it waters down the filmmakers’ effort to produce a gorgeously shot crime thriller.
I think the Speirs played it very safe with “Midnight Taxi” (2024), their first feature-length film. The story has just about enough matter to hook you to it but not so much of a gut-wrenching, toe-curling narrative that leaves you to ponder for hours about the possibilities of criminal activities in London at midnight. In fact, the only professions we manage to get a glimpse of are those of sex workers, police, journalists, and cab drivers, a demographic not wide enough to encapsulate the spirit of a cosmopolitan city.
I think we can also blame the number of mediocre crime-thrillers that are regularly dished out by OTT platforms in this case. The fatigue of seeing too many murder mysteries is getting hauntingly real because every plot starts to feel predictable after a point. This is where the film, however, excels. While the dialogues needed some revision, it gives your knowledge of crime fiction a run for its money. It is a very promising film, and I highly recommend you give “Midnight Taxi” (2024) a try the moment it drops in your nearest theatres.
