El taxista
2023 · 10m · México
Directed by Alejandro Carrasco
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A night-shift taxi driver keeps working through a series of setbacks with his passengers while uncertainty grows over whether to keep waiting or go home to his family.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a patient, quiet film about a guy driving a cab—which sounds like the most consensus-friendly premise imaginable, and it kind of is. The real subversion is how *little* it does with that setup, trusting the audience to find the drama in waiting itself, which is either brilliant restraint or just restraint.
Carrasco positions this squarely in the neorealist lineage—the night-shift economy film, the man-at-work study—and executes it with formal discipline, letting the editing rhythm mirror the driver's mental state rather than impose it. It's the kind of structurally quiet work that reveals itself in retrospect.
The film hinges entirely on the decision to shoot the driver's face during the quiet moments between passengers, catching the micro-expressions of fatigue and calculation flickering across it—that's where the whole emotional architecture lives, and it's a choice that transforms a premise about a shift into something about the weight of choosing.