The gig economy grows fangs in writer-director Michael Pierro’s night-long nightmare Self Driver, which more than makes up for its minuscule budget with unrelenting ingenuity and a tap straight into the financial and technological anxieties of our modern existence. If you’ve ever watched the seconds between the rings of a phone call from a debt collector stretch out toward infinity then this movie (which just screened at Fantasia) has got your number, and it wants to put you through the wringer and back. Imagine After Hours made for fifty bucks and you’ve got the anxiety-laden idea.
Nathanael Chadwick stars as D, a former office drone recently turned redundant who’s been trying to keep the towering stacks of bills from falling over and smothering him ever since. Mostly from the front seat of his failing, trash-packed automobile where he chauffeurs folks around via a ride-share app called VRMR (pronounced “Vroomer” because Big Tech has even weaponized the alphabet against us at this point), scrounging together what he can to keep his wife and newborn housed, fed, you know—all the major luxuries of being alive in 2024.
And then one fateful day, among the demanding miscreants and puking party girls who parade through to muck up his back-seat, a savior seems to arrive—an exuberantly bearded and rather overly friendly dude who tells him he’s got a gig that he thinks D would be perfect for. Basically, because it’s the exact same gig. It’s working for a brand new rideshare app called ToNoMo (and if anybody has any guesses as to what that’s meant to stand for send ‘em along because I haven’t figured it out yet) that will make him thousands of dollars per night. And with enormous bonuses always just a button-push away.
It’s the sort of offer that’s obviously too good to be true and would be seen plain as such to anybody not flailing about at the extreme end of their rope—unfortunately, D is just that sucker. And after the briefest period of deliberation he latches onto the bait. Scrolling past an outrageously long set of “Terms and Conditions” that will surely not come to bite D in the ass, he’s then given a small set of rules that read like the tech version of Gremlins’ “Don’t let them eat after midnight” mandates. One, he needs to always do exactly what the app tells him to do. Two, he can never talk to the customers. Three—if he turns down a job he’s done for the night; no more jobs will be offered. And four—if he quits in the middle of a job he loses every cent of his entire night’s earnings.
So simple, so easy, so not at all harbingers of horrors to come amirite? And it does start out simple enough—he picks up a young woman in an angel costume and he drives her to her destination. Granted her destination is a sketchy back-alley entrance to some sort of red-light rave and she snorts coke in his backseat. But that’s surely something any ride-share driver’s experienced before. Heck they even chat a little, against the app’s stated rules, and nothing untoward happens. No harm or foul, and an easy couple of hundred bucks is suddenly his. Surely it will all go this swimmingly, right?
Of course notsomuch. And before D’s night is over he’ll have spent every ounce of himself trying to force the toothpaste back into the tube, to chaotic avail. Equal amounts humor and horror are wrung from what the app demands of D from customer to creepy-ass customer, as his night across the sordid back-alleys of Toronto—yes, terrifying Toronto!—becomes truly unhinged. And how far we’re willing to debase ourselves for the ka-ching sound of a paycheck is elucidated in wild, frenetic, and sometimes hallucinatory style. (It’s also got a killer anxiety-inducing score that’s reminiscent of The White Lotus’, so prepare yourselves for that, with perhaps a Xanax as needed.)
As D, Chadwick gives us a decent and overwhelmed everyman to rideshare along with—he makes all of this stupid and desperate behavior explicable because he, and the movie, makes it clear that we live in extremely desperate and stupid times. Which is to say that Self Driver turns out to be a lo-fi gem that scratches and gnaws away at the horrifying heart of our moment, ripping scabs right and left. Bloody but wiser, they say, spitting out teeth.