Film Review - Black Cab

Jay Simpson gives the human cost of technological progress a face in James Arden’s sharply observed, beautifully photographed 15-minute drama.

There is something particularly cruel about becoming obsolete while you are still perfectly capable of doing the thing you have spent your life learning to do. James Arden’s “Black Cab” takes that fear — increasingly familiar in an age of artificial intelligence, automation and machines designed to make human labor unnecessary — and shrinks it to the dimensions of one London taxi and one man stubbornly attempting to remain useful.

Set in early 2027, the 15-minute British short imagines a London in which autonomous ride service Ridar has won the legal right to expand its driverless vehicles throughout the country. Harry (Jay Simpson) is a third-generation black-cab driver watching the profession that helped define his father and grandfather — and, by extension, himself — disappear around him.

Arden could easily have turned that setup into an angry piece of anti-technology agitprop. Black Cab is considerably more intelligent than that. Its real subject isn't whether self-driving cars are good or bad. It is what happens when technological advancement collides with human dignity.

Harry is not simply losing customers. He is losing his answer to the question of who he is.

That distinction gives the film its emotional power.

Simpson, known for work including Chernobyl, Pistol and Black Mirror, is exactly the sort of actor the material requires. There is nothing grandiose about Harry. He isn't positioned as a heroic spokesman for the working class, nor does Arden romanticize him into some noble relic of a better England. He is simply a man trying to earn his living and provide for his family, clinging to optimism well past the point at which the audience can see how precarious his situation has become.

That ordinariness is essential.

One of the film's most painful ideas is also its simplest: Harry is still good at his job. The world has merely decided that being good at it is no longer enough.

He watches passengers choose the newer alternative. He struggles to secure fares. At home there are responsibilities waiting for him — a wife, a child, ordinary domestic obligations that don't disappear simply because an industry is changing. A published account of the HollyShorts screening describes Harry desperately attempting to pick up customers as his wife and son wait for him at home, with his inability to find work eventually pushing him toward emotional collapse.

Arden understands that this is where discussions about technological advancement often become disingenuous. We speak enthusiastically about efficiency, convenience and innovation in abstract terms. We speak much less comfortably about the person whose mortgage still needs paying after the algorithm arrives.

The film's fictional Ridar service is therefore less villain than inevitability.

That is much scarier.

Visually, the film gives that intimate story an unexpectedly cinematic scale. Cinematographer Adam Barnett photographed Black Cab on 35mm in a 2.55:1 aspect ratio, an unusually expansive choice for a 15-minute short. The format is particularly apt: Arden is telling a story about a traditional profession threatened by frictionless digital modernity while preserving it on photochemical film. Whether consciously symbolic or not, the contrast is difficult to miss. There is texture here where the fictional future promises sterility.

The black cab itself becomes more than transportation. It is workplace, inheritance, refuge and eventually something resembling a tomb for an identity that Harry isn't ready to bury.

Arden also resists one of the most common traps of near-future storytelling: overbuilding the future. There is no need for flying cars, holographic billboards or elaborate exposition. The world of Black Cab is frightening precisely because it looks like ours with the clock moved forward only slightly. Autonomous vehicles aren't some distant speculative invention within the film's conception; they're simply the next competitor waiting at the curb.

That proximity gives the story teeth.

If there is a limitation, it comes from the same economy that makes the film so effective. Fifteen minutes allows Arden to deliver the emotional blow cleanly, but the larger implications of Harry's predicament inevitably extend beyond what the short can investigate. The family dynamic, particularly, invites more exploration. Yet expanding the story might also dilute what Arden achieves through compression. Black Cab works because Harry's entire world seems to contract along with his employment prospects.

There is also something commendable about Arden's refusal to manufacture a convenient villain. Technology doesn't hate Harry. Progress isn't consciously cruel. Nobody has assembled in a boardroom specifically intending to destroy this particular man's life.

And yet his life is being changed all the same.

That may be the film's bleakest observation.

Gemma Dyllen, Anna-Maria Everett and Frankie Wilson round out the principal cast, while Brother Film produced the short in association with companies including Panavision, Kodak, TenThree and Electric Theatre Collective. Hugo Ellingham's music and sound design deserves particular notice within the film's carefully controlled atmosphere; the film's sound work later received Silver recognition at the 2026 Creative Circle Awards, alongside Gold for Best Short Film and Silver for Arden's direction.

But the lasting image of Black Cab isn't technological.

It's human.

A man behind a steering wheel, still ready to work, slowly discovering that the world may no longer require him.

That is what separates Arden's film from the countless stories currently trying to say something topical about AI and automation. Black Cab isn't ultimately afraid that machines will become human. It is afraid that, in our excitement over what machines can do, we may become increasingly comfortable treating humans like disposable technology.

The film had its world premiere at the 2026 HollyShorts Film Festival and has also been selected for Aesthetica and recognized by both the Creative Circle Awards and the 1.4 Awards. Those accolades make sense. Arden has taken an enormous cultural conversation and found the smallest possible vessel for it: one cab, one family and one man watching the future pull away without him.

Verdict: A poignant, beautifully crafted and unsettlingly timely short, Black Cab transforms the coming automation debate from a question of technology into one of human worth. Jay Simpson's grounded central performance and Arden's restrained direction ensure that the film doesn't lecture about the future. It simply asks us to look at who may be left standing at the curb when it arrives.