Review: THE TOLL

Spencer is a rideshare driver and is going through the nearby requests at the midnight end of the shift. He picks a woman waiting at the airport. She's Cami and at the end of a long day of plane travel on her way to her dad's ranch out of town. Oh yeah, at Spencer's prompt she keys in the destination and they're off. Spencer's chat could do with a little coaching but he seems more awkward than dangerous. He notes how long the drive is and, between the decent fare and the time commitment he balances with a philosophical, "ok." The city fades behind them as his conversation takes a slight turn towards the invasive and the fatigued woman begs a little quiet time to have a doze in the back as they're going. All well. When she wakes up he's taking a weird way and they're in the middle of nowhere, entering an endless forest. At the point where she asks him to stop so she can get out the car itself stops, shutting down apart for the lights. Now what?

Well, you might imagine some trust bargaining dialogue broken with a binding external force that threatens them both. All of that but when I say this movie does this messily I don't mean that it's poorly written. On the contrary, the way this typical scenario is broken up allows for some genuinely eerie moments which are entirely done by using the setting and some imagination. There is something weird happening around them and it might be happening to them and by the time things get physical it feels far too late to do more than stand and wait for dawn. To quote one of the best lines of The Blair Witch Project, "I'm afraid to open my eyes ... I'm afraid to close them." At one point something writes in the condensation on the rear window: Please pay the Toll Man. Who or what the Toll Man is and how to pay or cheat him is the rest of this movie.

Jordan Hayes as Cami gives us a woman troubled by her family life and past and distrustful of even her nearest and dearest. Spencer is one of her many nightmares and Max Topplin plays him on the edge of unsettlingly weird and unfairly judged. It's down to these two performers to convince us that once they find that they only have each other to rely on that they will still be worth watching and the way that's done feels like actors who are ready for each other and a director who can work with that. While there are situations that edge towards contrivance later and others that speak more for art direction than storytelling we invest in Cami and Spencer with the feeling that if we didn't we too would be alone on that road surrounded by woods that have their own motives. It's in that growing dread where this film finds the originality that lifts it above some of the best small horror films. It's not gamechanging newness here (all genre films dpened on their partial resemblance to earlier ones) but a quiet and crafty hand with weaving character background with a new take on established mythology. We are left with the torchlight that makes the trees look as scary as they do when you can't see them.

The past decade and a bit have been good to genre cinema as the good credit from The Blair Witch Project and its slowburn punky legacy of drawing the most out of the least continues to bear reward. Just as no one blinked at roughness as a quality of a rock album after punk or live music that scaled down to present something stronger for being closer to its audience, a film made with slight means that appears on VoD regardless of any time in the cinema faces no serious stigma from a contemporary audience. This is how new horror films have been able to do what this one does: concentrate on a small but significant change to the rules while nurturing creditable performances. Twenty years ago the notion of feature films being shot on video was at a crossover point between looking cheap and feeling innovative. The Anniversary Party flaunted it in 2001. Stephen Soderberg boasted of shooting Unsane on a modified iPhone. Now, however it looks it's just a movie like any other and now, more than ever what gets put into it is the difference. The Toll makes a difference. It doesn't shake ground but does break a little.

The Toll is currently on Shudder in Australia.