When Iris’ friends drive away from a campsite parking lot while she’s in the bathroom, she’s stranded in the middle of nowhere with an overstuffed backpack and a dead phone. As she walks along the road in search of help, a car pulls over, and Noah—a good-looking guy with the same weirdo taste in music as Iris—offers her a ride. They seem to be getting along, but when Iris cuts short a pit stop, Noah takes it as a slight, and it soon becomes evident that he may not be so harmless after all.
After drifting off during the car ride, Iris wakes to find that Noah has chosen her as a target for his rage: it’s pitch black out, and he’s driven even further into the wilderness with the intent to kill her. Desperate to survive, Iris appeals to Noah’s ego, and it works—at first. But by the end of the night, only one person will leave the car alive.
Director’s Vision
I made Do You Need A Ride because I believe we need to find a new way to talk about toxic masculinity. While the world has changed a lot in the last decade, the attitude that “boys will be boys” is not yet extinct. And we already know that the consequences of this conditioning are dire: for proof, look at just about any news story involving the rape or murder of women.
Even though shows like Big Little Lies and movies like Promising Young Woman have us finally talking about the consequences of this kind of masculinity, it sometimes feels like we’re still missing the point. Sure, men like Harvey Weinstein or Alexander Skarsgard’s Big Little Lies character Perry Wright pose a real and dangerous threat, but the root of toxic masculinity isn’t “manly” behavior or even aggression: it’s entitlement. From GamerGate to “incel” culture, the internet is rife with examples of “nice” guys who feel so entitled to women’s time and attention that when they don’t get what they want, they believe they have a right to go out and take it.
But we are afraid to offend the delicate sensibilities of the men around us by acknowledging that male fragility is putting us all in danger. I say screw that: it’s high time that we recognize “manliness” for the farce that it is. The sooner we decide it’s okay for men to be laughed at, the sooner women will stop dying.
