The Cab
2023 · 20m · USA
Directed by Nicole Melillo
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
After taking her own life, a young woman named Eva finds herself in an eerie purgatory disguised as an ordinary New York City taxi ride, guided by an enigmatic Cabbie who forces her to confront the darkest corners of her soul before she can determine her final destination.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Melillo bets everything on a single location and two actors, and wins — the cab isn't a metaphor that's explained, it's one that's inhabited, and that restraint is what makes the film's stakes feel real.
Purgatory as a New York yellow cab ride. Twenty minutes inside a taxi with an enigmatic Cabbie. Jacob's Ladder comparison is brave. Single-location spiritual reckoning is a genre with very few good examples and many bad ones. The description doesn't show me the language to know which this is.
Nicole Melillo strips purgatory to a single NYC yellow cab interior — the spatial compression generates a spiritual reckoning you can't get out of, which is the right formal answer to the premise.
Reviews
This is a haunting and beautiful piece.
Festivals
- Bentonville Film Festival 2023, Jury Award Best Short