I’ve always thought that one of the worst customer service jobs you can ever have is being a taxi driver.
The abuse you receive, the constant small talk and occasionally the mess you have to clean up are just too much.
In Michael Pierro’s noir-ish thriller Self Driver we follow Uber driver D, who is looking to settle his money woes and get back on the straight and narrow when he is offered a different kind of job. Will he take the opportunity or stick out his frustrating existence?
You may feel initially that this is going in a similar route to Michael Mann’s Collateral, but Pierro’s film never comes close to hitting those heights and never really gets out of second gear.
D, has to follow the instructions of a new app which gives him instructions of who to pick up and what to do with them; for example, in one case he is asked to continually punch one guy and for each mission completed he will add to his night’s haul, which is, at maximum $5000.
Self Driver feels more like a character study than something that is going to break out into action territory. It is designed to show us the underbelly of this city, which I feel is meant to be Los Angeles, without it outrightly saying.
The concept is better than the execution and Self Driver feels like a film that needed a bit of extra gas in the tank to really shift gear.
Self Driver screened as part of Grimmfest 2024.
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