Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on March 6, 2009, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There are some bumps in the road on the trip Shuttle takes, but as on any good vacation, the destination is worth the problems getting there. Actually, the Mexican jaunt enjoyed by the film’s two young heroines is over as the movie begins, and what should be their simple trip home becomes an uneven but ultimately gripping nightmare.
In Shuttle, the trouble has already started for longtime best friends Mel (Peyton List) and Jules (Cameron Goodman) once their plane has touched down; Mel is suffering air sickness, and they’re held up in the terminal when one of their bags goes missing. They wind up being among the last people left there on the rainy night, along with Seth (James Snyder), a constant on-the-maker who takes the opportunity to put the moves on Jules, and his disapproving buddy Matt (Dave Power). When a shuttle bus arrives and its driver (Tony Curran) offers the girls a cheap fare, they gratefully climb aboard, with Seth and Matt following them on.
As they set off on the dark freeways, the dynamics at first seem predictable; Jules succumbs to Seth’s flirtatious charms, the more serious Mel and Matt form a tentative bond and there’s the inevitable irritable fifth wheel, an uptight businessman named Andy (Cullen Douglas). His complaining is at first the worst part of the trip…and then the driver doesn’t go where he’s supposed to. And then he seems to have gotten them lost. And then it becomes clear that he knows exactly what he’s doing, with the gun he produces insuring that his passengers go along with him.
More should not be said about the driver’s actions or intentions, though it becomes clear early on to the quintet trapped on his shuttle that simply robbing them and letting them go is not what he has in mind. As the situation gets increasingly worse, screenwriter and debuting director Edward Anderson unfolds the kind of scenario that, if it works, has the audience asking themselves what they would do in such a situation. And it does work, even if the characters’ reactions to their predicament range from reasonable and resourceful to occasionally downright ill-judged. (This is especially the case, as often happens in this kind of film, when it comes to taking the opportunity to put the villain down permanently.)
Anderson makes excellent use of locations around Boston (apparently its bad side), staging key scenes in areas that seem remarkably if not improbably deserted, with occasional punchy bursts of bloody violence. The gloom-and-doomy cinematography by Michael Fimognari is a key asset, and he and Anderson make effective use of handheld camera without indulging in the headache-inducing shakiness some filmmakers mistake for “realism”—though the staging of a few action scenes within the shuttle’s tight space become visually muddled. Heading the small and naturalistic ensemble, Scottish actor Curran (who also drove The Midnight Meat Train, and whose appearance and demeanor here bring Tobin Bell to mind) is a study in calm, coiled menace, and List makes for a compelling heroine as Mel tries to hold it together, for her sake and Jules’.
As the fate that awaits the girls comes into sharper relief, Anderson really tightens the screws, and in the final act, he manages to take the proceedings out of the bus’ confines without losing the movie’s sense of claustrophobic dread. Though an in-the-face-of-death confession by one of the pals feels a little out of left field, so much sympathy has been built up for them by this point that it doesn’t break the spell, and the finale sees Anderson paying off on moments he’s set up before in ways that are both clever and chilling. By the time the full, tragic force of Shuttle’s windup hits you, you may find yourself thinking back over the prior implausibilities—not to pick the story apart, but to reassure yourself that something this awful couldn’t happen in real life…could it?
