Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Michael Nader
Starring: Jordan Hayes, Max Topplin, James McGowan, Rosemary Dunsmore
As a kid I always got a thrill whenever my family would return home to the
city late at night from a day in the country. Looking up through the
sunroof of my Dad's car at the tendril-like tree branches passing
overhead, my mind would begin to wonder what might happen if the car
conked out and we got stuck on one of those spooky roads. I wonder if
writer/director Michael Nader had similar experiences on the
backroads of Canada as an over-imaginative kid, as his debut feature
The Toll plays into just such a fear.
Nader opens his film with a close-up of an Uber driver's app. The driver
dismisses a pair of potential male passengers before accepting the first
woman he comes across. Is he avoiding men for safety reasons (hands up, I
probably would), or does he have a more sinister reason for selecting a
female passenger?
Said passenger is Cami (Jordan Hayes), who is zonked out after a
storm caused her flight to be delayed and land at 3am. Her driver, Spencer
(Max Topplin) agrees to take her to her father's place, a long
drive out to "the boonies". A motormouth, Spencer can't stop chatting to a
disinterested Cami, who eventually pulls the old "I don’t mean to be rude
but I really just want to sleep" defence. When she wakes up a bit later
and Spencer's conversation becomes a little too intrusive (the sap even
invites her out hunting), Cami starts to worry for her safety.
Cami gets even more paranoid when Spencer's car breaks down after
seemingly hitting a figure who appeared in the road. But there's no fresh
roadkill anywhere to be seen. Spencer suggests sitting it out until help
arrives, but Cami is convinced this is all part of some sick plot on his
part, and so she decides to set off into the night. When the road she
follows leads her back in a circle, it seems something very unnatural is
going on. Something in the woods seems to be leaving messages for Cami and
Spencer, and preying on their distrust of one another.
Even if The Toll were simply a story of two people stuck on
a creepy stretch of road late at night, it would make for an effective
horror movie. Delivering us relatively few glimpses of just what is
messing with Spencer and Cami (a creepy tall figure clad in white), Nader
instead mines fear from the unseen. Just what is lurking behind those
dimly lit trees at the edge of the road? Anyone who has experienced
driving down such a road at night will feel a tingle of terror at Cami and
Spencer's predicament.
But The Toll is more than simply a reworking of the setup of
The Strangers (a movie knowingly referenced in dialogue
here). With the dynamic between Cami and Spencer, Nader taps into the
increasing mistrust of the other that has caused rifts in western society
in recent years. Nader exploits our own instincts to rush to judgement. We
might initially write off Spencer as a creepy weirdo or Cami as a stuckup
cow, but as Nader reveals the reasons why they might have been targeted by
whatever supernatural force is playing with them, we start to feel bad for
passing judgement on two people we only superficially know. As the night
ticks on, Spencer and Cami realise they might have more in common than
they would have ever suspected. Forcing these two disparate figures to
work together for their survival is a potent allegory for the truce that
needs to be called in our current culture wars if we're to make any
progress.
The Toll is on Shudder from July
15th.
