Maybe after seeing Fox Hunt Drive people will get the message that rideshares should be avoided at all costs. Why would anyone want to drive for, or get a ride in, an Uber or any rideshare for that matter? After Spree, End of Ride, Rideshare and Driven it should be obvious the only place you’ll get quickly in one is dead.

Alison Meyers (Lizzie Zerebko) should be an architect. She’s got talent, and a degree, she even did an internship. But she’s lost her job and can’t seem to find a new one. So she drives for a rideshare company called Backseat, which, I suppose makes her a backseat driver. She’s about to call it a night when she gets one more notification on her app. She has her misgivings, The Passenger (Michael Olavson) doesn’t look anything like his profile picture. And both he and his duffel bag give off bad vibes. Against her better judgement, she tells him to get in.

A suspicious phone call, a stop at a rest area and a covert look through his bag later Alison realizes she should have left him at the curb. The bag contains a gun and some jewelry. And it’s covered in blood. But her passenger has caught the attention of both Detective Hartford (Ryan Forrestal) and others on the wrong side of the law. And now she’s on their radar as well.

Director Drew Walkup, along with writers Adam Armstrong and Marcus Devivo has crafted an extremely low budget thriller that relies on two performances and several story twists rather than big set pieces. And once that first twist kicks in Fox Hunt Drive gets complicated fast, and continues to get more so as the night wears on.

Zerebko and Olavson are excellent in their roles and helped keep me invested in the story even when it pushed the limits of believability. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time Fox Hunt Drive stays well within the bounds of what I can accept from this kind of film. But there were a couple of things that seemed just a bit too coincidental or out of character to believe.

Fox Hunt Drive is an excellent debut feature for Walkup, Devivo and Armstrong. It’s also a sort of culmination of a long journey as they and Olavson have known and done short films together since high school. I wish I could say more about it but I don’t want to risk giving things away. Because with a plot like this, knowing the outcome of one situation can easily give away others.

Currently on the festival circuit and playing as part of the 2020 Virtual Cinequest Film Festival you can check out Fox Hunt Drive’s website and Facebook page to see where it will play next.