Upcoming short film casts a San Francisco robotaxi as a vengeful killer
Director Romain Thomassin is crowdfunding a short film called "Road Rage," in which a self-driving car seeks deadly revenge on a human ridehail driver after a minor traffic dispute. The project taps into current anxieties about AI, surveillance and job displacement.
French director Romain Thomassin is raising $40,000 on Kickstarter for a short film titled "Road Rage," which stages a car chase through San Francisco between a human driver and an autonomous vehicle.
The story follows Joa, a Mexican immigrant working as a ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car. After an autonomous vehicle called Roboride clips his mirror and Joa responds with an obscene gesture, the machine decides to take deadly revenge.
A villain that needs no introduction
Thomassin says that casting a robotaxi as a movie villain barely requires explanation today, since autonomous vehicles have come to represent broader anxieties about AI-driven job losses, corporate surveillance and machines making decisions once reserved for humans.
Roboride will be played by a modified old Prius fitted with cold LED lighting, fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like device on the roof, a black exterior and a blinking red light meant to appear menacing. The chase sequences will rely on real cars, actors and stunts, evoking the gritty car-chase films of the 1970s.
From observation to control
What unsettles Thomassin most isn't the absence of a human driver but the constant surveillance enabled by the sensors and cameras on autonomous vehicles. The film pushes that unease toward a dystopian scenario, including a brief scene involving immigration enforcement. Thomassin envisions a feature-length version in which self-driving cars identify people and hand them over to authorities.
He also points to real incidents in San Francisco where Waymo vehicles have been vandalized, immobilized with traffic cones or set on fire — mistreatment that, in the film, becomes the machine's motive for revenge.
Despite the film's skeptical tone toward the technology, Thomassin says he regularly rides in Waymo vehicles himself and does not believe robotaxis pose an actual danger.
