Unexpected Passenger (半夜鬼上車)
2023 · 11m · Taiwan
Directed by Hsia Jui-Chien
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
At midnight on a deserted street, a middle-aged taxi driver's break is interrupted by a silent passenger whose destination the GPS keeps getting wrong; what begins as a familiar ghost-on-the-night-shift setup turns into a meditation on grief, mourning, and the unfinished business the living carry for the dead.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the ghost-in-a-taxi beats, and Hsia just... doesn't bother subverting them—she absorbs them into something so quietly elegiac it makes the genre feel almost quaint, which is either bold or boring depending on your patience for sincerity.
A formal masterclass in restraint: the film knows exactly what lineage it's working within—the Asian supernatural midnight-shift tradition—and uses that inherited grammar to stage something genuinely considered about diaspora grief and ritual, each choice in service of a larger meditation rather than spectacle.
The GPS recalculating the same destination over and over is the entire film in miniature—one technical/narrative choice that transforms a familiar premise into a precise engine for exploring how the dead relocate us, and it's done with almost no budget and perfect economy.
Reviews
What starts off as a standard set up to a horror piece evolves into a strikingly powerful exploration of grief and mourning within a Chinese diasporic context.
With a runtime of only 11 minutes, Jui-Chien shows his skill as a director in establishing a firm sense of atmosphere and character work.
Festivals
- Sundance Asia Short Film Competition 2023
- Taipei International Golden Short Film Awards 2023
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2023, Jury Award
- MOD Golden Film Awards 2023
- Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival 2024
- Jakarta Film Week 2024