End Trip is a 2018 horror thriller about a rideshare driver who picks up an unusual fare, one with a recent troubled past who takes his driver on a disturbing odyssey.
With the evolution of car services like Uber, movies have taken to the ridesharing motif as opportunity to use them as a sort of moving story teller. While this kind of thing isn’t entirely fresh – HBO’s long running Taxicab Confessions could certainly be fodder enough for a whole slew of movies – a few filmmakers are looking to give feature length runs at sitting in a car. Steven Knight‘s Locke tops most lists of such, but there are several independent movie makers who are truly trying to give the setting a twist. Enter Aaron Jay Rome‘s new film End Trip, a clever chiller that uses rideshare as catalyst for something well beyond the backseat chatter you might expect.
In an unnamed city, on the night shift, URyde driver Brandon (Aaron Jay Rome) is having an average run behind the wheel, picking up the usual cast of passengers whom all have some stories to tell. He politely lends an ear and we see he’s a sympathetic guy, willing to go the extra step to be a good driver. His latest fare is a young man named Judd (Eric LeBlanc), who requests Brandon to simply drive him around as he just wants to be out of the house for awhile. What begins as a kind of insta-friend connection turns into a night of bizarre exploration and ultimately, graphic horror.
One of the more obvious trapping of the rideshare movie is that it tends to keep the entire movie in the car, a narrative device that certainly can prove effective, but also limiting. Rome does keep much of the film in the confines of Brandon’s car but opens the doors quite a bit, putting us into a number of different locations, including Brandon’s home. In fact, the film is sort of split into two parallel parts, with some of the story set entirely in his house with his girlfriend Stef (Ashley Lenz, who has this terrific Melanie Lynskey vibe and is breathlessly good throughout). What happens there and who is with her I won’t even hint at revealing, but it gets dark. Very, very dark.
At about the halfway point, End Trip seemingly lets its cat out of the bag, something that might feel far too early a thing to do, we the viewer, so primed now to be simply satisfied by only a twist, thinking there could be no place else for it to go, but surprisingly, Rome leads us further down the rabbit hole. With a deeply disturbing end game, we come to find that at least one of the players in this story is much different than they appear after a remarkable transformation sequence in the third act that resets the boundaries for where movies like Single White Female seemed to have firmly established the limits.
It’s a little hard to discuss the impact of End Trip without spoiling its secrets, and while it has a number of pots on the stove, Rome manages to keep everything clicking along without too much down time. It splits services between a rideshare horror flick and a survivor’s nightmare, putting a lot of emphasis on the mental breakdown of one of its characters, and while it lacks the polish of a studio release, is nonetheless a deliciously sinister little horror gem.