Having had its UK premiere on the Friday of this year’s FrightFest, Drive Back directed by Cody Ashford, is the road trip from hell as a man and his fiancée get lost on the back roads on the way home from his parents and end up coming up against untold horrors which will have them facing their own life paths and the consequences that brought them there.
After celebrating their recent engagement at his parents remote cabin, artist Reid (Zack Gold) and his pregnant partner Olivia (Whit Kunschik) hit the road following a mysterious warning from his father. Whilst on the road, they encounter a near miss which causes them to become lost and disorientated at a crossroads. After choosing a route to take, the couple begin to experience bizarre and frightening phenomena including feelings of deja vu, time loops and terrifying chance encounters with hitchhikers. As they journey deeper and deeper into their own personal nightmares, they attempt to discover if there is a way out dictated by the choices they must make.
Utilising the very simple allegory of a couple approaching a crossroads in their lives as the typical life-path of marriage and a baby is laid out before them, Drive Back demonstrates monstrously how one detour can derail a previously mapped out future. From the get go, Reid and Olivia don’t feel like a cohesive couple, they seem to be slightly disjointed and on edge with each other, even whilst just journeying in a car together, before they are stuck on a seemingly never ending road. The tension between them feels as if it's about to explode at any second and as they experience more terror, they soon unravel. It soon becomes clear Reid and Olivia have doomed themselves to constantly repeat patterns of learned behaviour from the generations before them, with particular emphasis on Reid’s father and their relationship, which is obviously highlighted by Reid’s own fear of impending fatherhood.
As the horror unfolds, viewers are treated to some genuinely disturbing visuals, but a lot of the terror lies in the psychological aspect of Drive Back, with a dread soaked feeling of the inevitable imbued in the second half of the film. Despite its relatively simple concept that harks back to under-appreciated road trip horror Dead End (2003), Drive Back is a disorientating exploration of relationships developed on unstable foundations that will collapse once shaken, and without intervention are condemned to re-runs of toxic behaviours and destruction.
3.5 Screams out of 5
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