A Taxi Of Coldness

It starts with a phone call, one over which the other party can "smell the alcohol". He points out that though it's 2016 they haven't invented a phone that can do that yet.

The film's title makes use of the illuminated sign above the car. It's reflected, distorted by angle, in the gloss white of the roof, one of several excellent touches in a film that feigns to frighten. From a mother lit by the blinking of hazard lights, subtitles whose colour reflects reported speech, the mirror and monitor of the in-car camera.

Joonha Kim's film takes place almost entirely within the confines of a Kia K5, the third generation Optima. There's a flashback to a mother's sofa, apple and knife and folkloric warning. There's a parallel passenger, in receipt of a different bad time. There's a pair of train stations too, but the track between them is perhaps a moral one, a philosophical one.

There are credits before the title, director of photography Junwoo Kim and lighting director Seongrok Hwang getting rightful nods. Outwith the four-door sedan we get on board camera, domestic bliss, drunken intersection. The story (and by extension the stories within it) are about taxi drivers who offer their passengers something laced with something else. It's the discussion around that after an offer is made within a late night taxi that make A Taxi of Coldness as transporting.

Hoil Song's music adds to the mixture, as with screens not as much split as multiply exposed giving greater depth to it all. As Joonha Kim's only credit, it shows talent in both writing and direction. Seunghoon Bak's performance as passenger is balanced by Bonghag Maeng as his driver and Minae Oh as his mother. He pays different attention to both. There are and will be other voices, and it's something said over the credits that casts a further, different, light upon proceedings. Screening as part of the multinational shorts programme at the 2022 Taiwan Film Festival in Edinburgh, this South Korean film joins two Taiwanese and a Japanese work in a polyglot exploration of self and place. Prompted (per the bumpf) by John Donne's musings about men and islands, A Taxi of Coldness is informed by boundaries. As with "Can You Hear Me?" there's a coda that rebalances what has come before, difficult enough in feature but harder still in short film.

That the song playing over the credits is called Sweet Love doesn't matter as much as message on the box marked 'charity', one we see in more detail at the very end. We've had discussions about trust, about society, about belief, but for all that there's jawing about it there's more to chew over than it seems. As a fresh take on an urban legend A Taxi Of Coldness is in mixed company, but its crispness, its coolness, its polish, all are indications of something as sharp and clean as a coin newly minted.