Ignoring phone calls from his landlord, and dissembling on calls from his live-in partner - who wants to know when he'll be home to help with the baby, and why the wifi isn't working, he's paid the bill hasn't he? - ride-sharing driver D doesn't have to think long and hard when a passenger suggests he do the same work for a new company. As long as he doesn't talk to the passengers, and does EVERYTHING the app tells him to do, he can make a lot more money essentially doing the same work that is leaving him broke.
Nathanael Chadwick's D has quickly established himself as a sympathetic character: laid off from his office job by a corporate merger, he uncomplainingly tries to do right by his young family and even by his often-obnoxious customers. So when he accepts the stranger's offer, we're rooting for him to start pulling down several thousand bucks a night, even if it means - what? - transporting drugs and guns?
At first this seems to be the case, and maybe D can handle it, but as the long night wears on, the tension mounts as D is ordered to transport an armed thief - or maybe hit man - and this new rideshare's business starts to appear more and more predatory. This might be D's first big night to make big bucks, but the rideshare fines him every time he makes a wrong move, and the things it makes him do become more ruthless and more dangerous.
Chadwick heads a small cast (augmented by hundreds of bystanders and partygoers in the background of Toronto night streets, and late in the film, even a pair of prowling raccoons) with vivid entries also made by Christian Aldo as the gunman, Catt Filippov as a professional party girl, and Reece Presley and Lauren Welchner as a pair of nasty quasi-vampiric kidnappers. With these forces at play, not until the last scenes do we find out if D can both extricate and redeem himself.
Since its emergence after World War II, film noir has always been cinema's low-budget underbelly, devising works that have kept stoking viewers' imaginations longer than most of their more mainstream contemporaries. Made with cellphones, a small cast and crew, and an expert score from Antonio Naranjo, Michael Pierro's "Self Driver" makes a good case for nouveau film noirs that are even darker and grittier than their predecessors.
