The Toll / The Toll Man

 After some delays with her flight, Cami (Jordan Hayes) arrives too late after a cross-country flight to get a lift from the family she's come to visit. So she gets a ride from an app on her phone, and hopes for the best. The best, at least in that area at two in the morning, seems to be Spencer (Max Topplin).

 I have no idea what the other end of, say, the Uber app looks like for the driver, but here it's a tinder-like affair where Spencer gets to swipe through several people asking for rides near him until he settles on Cami. To drive the point home, it even includes a profile picture. It might be unintentional, but this already sets up an interesting imbalance between the driver and the passenger.

 As if being chauffeured through the backwoods late at night by a stranger wasn't already fraught enough, Spencer also acts like a total creep - oversharing, making inappropriate comments, listening in and commenting on a personal call. Its enough to make Cami discreetly reach for her mace even before Spencer mentions he likes to hunt with bows and arrows, and jokes about human prey. Dude.

 The tensions come to a head when the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, after taking a side road that Cami does not recognize, but Spencer swears was on the GPS. Unfortunately for them that stretch of road is haunted by Toll Man - a supernatural creature with reality bending powers who won't let anyone out of its domain unless he's paid his due.... in blood! (cue the screen slowly turning red.) Now these two people who barely trust each other must band together to try and survive the night.

 

 The Toll Man is actually an interesting concept - I won't spoil what he's all about, but there's a little exposition delivered by a crazed-looking passerby (Rosemary Dunsmore) that outlines the bones of a pretty original and fairly cool mythology. Sadly, his methods of fucking around with his prey are mainly low-level manipulations and manifesting representations of deeply held traumas in a way that comes off as both sleazy and superficial. He's also not much of a presence in the film, leaving most of the dirty work to a band of unscary masked helpers and a bunch of hallucinations.
 It's all pretty far from being either original or cool, and coupled with some further tiresome bickering between the two leads, it brings down most of the third act. To top it off there's a weak twist that fails to add anything to the story, recontextualize things, or even surprise in any meaningful way.

 Things are fine on the technical front - it looks decent, only faltering when attempting to convey the uncanny with a budget that doesn't stretch far enough to even get some decent costumes for the ghouls. Aesthetically it's got a couple nice images (I liked the play of headlights on the treeline, for example) and it looks fairly slick, but other than that it's your typical modern, too-dark night-in-the-woods filmmaking.

 The acting is probably the film's strongest point, and both characters are easy to sympathize with - Spencer, as it turns out, is seemingly just awkward and a bit of a dumbass, while Cami's a resourceful and observant young woman in a very relatable bind from the get-go. Writer/Director Michael Nader supports both of them with his script, to a point, although it descends into having them just blurt out their fears and motivations every so often.

 Sadly, things get sillier and sillier once the supernatural elements come to the fore. It doesn't help that most of the would-be scares and revelations feel like padding, making an eighty-minute film feel longer than it has any right to.

 Shame, because both the setup and the actual premise of the movie had some potential. Those strengths, and the execution of the movie's first half almost makes me want to overlook how badly it botches things afterwards. Almost.