Notable Cast: Nathanael Chadwick, Reece Presley, Lauren
Welchner, Christian Aldo, Harold Tausch
I’m not sure that companies like Uber or Lyft would
appreciate the terms' Uber Horror” or “Lyft Horror,” but I’m unsure what else
would be more fitting for a film like Self Driver. Saturated in a luscious
score, lo-fi and drastically intimate camera shots, and a tense build that ends
up sucking its viewers in, Michael Pierro’s Self Driver is the kind of
indie thriller darlings that always end up cutting through during a film
festival. It’s niche enough that it might be a harder sell for distributors if
it gets picked up for a more significant release, but it’s the kind of strange
and off-kilter film that we strive to find at Blood Brothers Film Reviews. It’s
nuanced genre cinema of the best type and will definitely be a highlight of
Panic Fest 2025.
Told almost exclusively from the car of the ‘VRMR’
driver—again, think of it as the equivalent of Uber or Lyft—Self Driver
is the kind of intimate thriller one only finds in the indie sector. Mostly
that’s because Self Driver needs to be ultra-confident to pull off the
narrative, and it absolutely is.
When D, played with stunning subtlety by Nathanael Chadwick,
finds himself locked out of his driving service app, VRMR, for the night, he
remembers a previous passenger who offered to bring him in on a more exclusive
driving service that pays significantly more money. He’s strapped for cash and
needs to keep working throughout his Friday night, so he opts into the app and
some of its strange rules. However, with each new passenger he picks up, the
moral gray areas of their trips become increasingly volatile and problematic —
but is the cash too good to refuse?
The concept of “how far will a person go for money” is
hardly original, but reflecting on stellarly executed films like 13: Game of
Death or Cheap Thrills indeed suggests that the idea is ripe for
exploration. With Self Driver, the suffocating intimacy of its
low-budget approach makes it work. It’s as if the audience is always sitting in
the car with D staring at his face, and how the camera continually showcases
the vehicle as its own character makes its viewers feel both like a fly on the
way and an unwilling participant in its narrative spiral. It’s a choice I’ve
seen crash and burn many times, but Pierro miraculously makes it unnerving
through the tight shots, naturalistic night lighting, and the pulsating score
(which might be one of the best scores I’ve heard this year.)
Self Driver also ramps up the awkwardness of its
escalating tension with remarkable ease. While D’s first pick-up under this new
app, which is not available in the app store if you wanted to know your first
sign that something is probably not entirely legal, starts like any other trip,
the young woman has a reaction at the end that already pushes the moral
quandary of the film’s set up onto the audience. She’s obviously in a bad
situation just by her nuanced and worried behavior, but the money calls and D
starts down his path of bad decision-making.
Any great horror or thriller will push its audience to think
about what they would do in any given situation, and Self Driver pushes
that to some intriguingly dire limits. Even though it becomes very apparent by
the end that D needs to bail and get the authorities involved, it’s not
unbelievable. It’s a magic trick to get an audience to still believe he would
continue, and the film does it commendably. There is a moment, however, where
the film truly challenges its audience with its realistic approach. In this
case, it’s the film's final moments, but the experience of getting there is
such a fantastic deep dive into social and moral anxiety that it didn’t bother
me nearly as much as I would have thought looking back. It’s a CHOICE to be
made for sure.
Ultimately, Self Driver is an experience of a
thriller. Yes, the entire narrative is something you’ve probably seen before,
sure, but the experience of this one makes it utterly worth the watch. Whether
it’s the ranged performances from nuanced to bat-shit insane, the tension
provided by the closeness of the camera and audience to the characters in the
car, or the manner that the script rachets up the moral questions as it goes, Self
Driver is secretly one of the best films I saw at Panic Fest 2025. I hope
that it gets the proper distribution to find its audience.
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