'Black Cab's twisty ending, explained

A young couple kidnapped by a creepy driver is a straightforward enough horror concept, but Bruce Goodison's Black Cab throws in a spooky twist to shake things up.

While the first two acts are easy enough to follow, the movie's ending — and particularly the final moments — is a bit more of a head scratcher.

What was the deal with that ghost? Is Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) alive or dead at the end? We've had a go at breaking it down below.

What's Black Cab about?

First, a quick recap of the key points. In Black Cab, Anne and her fiancé Patrick (Luke Norris) are kidnapped by a taxi driver called Ian (Nick Frost), who claims to have driven Anne previously. After remembering that he picked her up from a hospital maternity ward and spoke to her about her pregnancy in their last ride, Ian electrocutes Patrick with a taser and zip-ties both of them.

Ian then drives them to Mabel Hill, a notorious road that he claims is haunted by the ghost of a woman whose child died before she did — a ghost that Anne herself keeps catching glimpses of during their drive. But it isn't until the final act that we discover why Ian is doing this.

What happens at the end of Black Cab?

We learn Ian has a wife and son of his own, but he's clearly mentally unstable. Although he changes his story a couple of times, the final version reveals that he's had ideas of killing the boy as a way to punish his wife for accusing him of cheating. Ian believes these dark thoughts are what's led to him being haunted by the ghost he's seen on the road; he thinks she's searching for a living child as a replacement for her own that she lost.

Ian's twisted plan in kidnapping Anne, therefore, is to offer her and her unborn baby up to the ghost as a way of getting her to leave him alone. The problem? As Anne finally reveals to Ian, she's no longer pregnant; she had a miscarriage shortly after he gave her that previous lift from the hospital.

After breaking this news Anne chases after the ghost, accusing her of taking her baby. Ian runs away through the woods only to circle back to his black cab. He gets in, drives off, then appears to crash into Anne when she runs out into the road — but when he gets out and checks, there's nobody there. As he drives off again we see a ghostly image of Anne sitting in the back seat of his cab.

Credit: Shudder

What really happens to Anne at the end?

A lot to unpack, isn't it? The main question we were left with when Black Cab finished, though, had to do with Anne's fate. Is she alive at the end of the film, or dead? What's happened to her?

Ultimately Anne's fate isn't clear, but the implication seems to be that she's dead at the end of the movie. Maybe she collapsed in the woods while chasing the ghost, dying from complications related to Ian also tasering her earlier in the film? Her cause of death isn't clear, but the fact that the road is empty after Ian appears to crash into her strongly suggests that Anne is a ghost at this point — as does the final shot of her sitting in the back seat of his cab as he drives away.

Our best guess? Anne has essentially replaced the ghost haunting her and Ian throughout the film. The ghost lost a child, so she took Anne's — and now that Anne's dead, like a curse being passed down, she'll be the one haunting Mabel Hill in search of what she's lost.

How to watch: Black Cab is streaming now on Shudder.