Nightride is a wry, real-time one-shot thriller set on the midnight streets of Belfast. It places us in the driver’s seat with smalltime dealer Budge as he tries to pull one last deal with cash borrowed from a dangerous loan shark. When the handover goes catastrophically wrong, Budge finds himself in a race against time to find his missing product and get a new buyer before the loan shark tracks him down.
Nightride is an American crime thriller film directed by Stephen Fingleton and starring Moe Dunford, Joana Ribeiro, Gerard Jordan, Ciaran Flynn, John Travers, Andrew Simpson, Ellie O’Halloran, Aaron McCusker, Desmond Eastwood, Paul Kennedy, Stephen Rea and Stephen Fingleton. The screenplay was written by Ben Conway.
Film Review for Nightride
First-time screenwriter Ben Conway has put together an interesting Belfast crime thriller, which pans out in a single, unbroken 97-minute take in real time, about a drug dealer doing one last catastrophic deal. Stephen Fingleton, who made an impression with his own 2015 debut The Survivalist, directs it with some elan.
Most of the film is a single, locked-off shot of a guy at the wheel of his car, talking tensely to people via a hands-free mobile while his life terrifyingly unravels. This owes quite a bit to Steven Knight’s lo-fi 2014 classic Locke, starring Tom Hardy doing very much the same thing. Moe Dunford (from Paddy Breathnach’s homelessness drama Rosie) plays Budge: a tough drug dealer looking for the traditional final big score to get him out of this filthy trade so he can set up an honest bodyshop repair business with a mate.
Without any camera cut, we watch Budge as he drives around barking instructions through his mobile phone: the plan is that he borrows €100,000 in cash from a well-known psychopath called Joe (Stephen Rea), one of many people that we just hear on the mobile; Budge plans to use this to buy some cocaine from Ukrainian gangsters (his girlfriend is Ukrainian) who need to unload it right now and get out of the country quickly; then he will sell these drugs to his contact for €200,000, pay Joe back plus €20,000 interest, which will leave him with enough left over to bring to the bank the next morning to set up this auto-repair business. And all in an hour and a half!
Of course, it goes horribly pear-shaped. There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track: his putative garage business associate – stunned and horrified by what Budge is getting dragged into – is fulfilling the plot function of a spouse or romantic partner, and I wonder if it’s plausible that a drug dealer of Budge’s prominence thinks he can just quit and become a civilian in the same city. Well, there’s some style to it.
Nightride (2022)
Directed by: Stephen Fingleton
Starring: Moe Dunford, Joana Ribeiro, Gerard Jordan, Ciaran Flynn, John Travers, Andrew Simpson, Ellie O’Halloran, Aaron McCusker, Desmond Eastwood, Paul Kennedy, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fingleton
Screenplay by: Ben Conway
Production Design by: Keelan McRoberts
Cinematography by: David Bird
Film Editing by: Mark Towns
Costume Design by: Diana Ennis
Music by: Phil Kieran
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: March 4, 2022
Views: 45
