What is the logline of Range Anxiety?
A routine ride-sharing driver's late-night trip deep into rural New York becomes a harrowing, all-night ordeal when his electric car's battery runs dangerously low — forcing him to confront real danger, creeping dread, and his own limits, before discovering that the worst night of his life may have also saved it.
Who is the protagonist?
Rick is a self-sufficient, practical man in his forties. He drives for Uber in his 2018 Nissan Leaf — an electric car he chose deliberately, for its low operating cost. He is methodical, organized, and quietly proud of his self-reliance. He knows his car's range. He knows where the chargers are. He has a system.
What Rick does not have is a plan for when the system fails.
He is not a hero in any cinematic sense. He is not brave or physically formidable. He is an ordinary man who makes sensible decisions and still ends up stranded in the dark, hours from home, talking to hold music. His anxiety is not irrational — it is completely earned. The film asks the audience to sit with him in it.
What is the film's world?
Long Island, New York to the Catskills and back. The film begins in the familiar, overlit comfort of suburban Long Island — gas stations, Welcome Centers, Uber apps, and routine — and slowly migrates into darkness: the rural Catskill Mountains, fog-wrapped two-lane roads, silent hospitals, empty courthouses, and a near-deserted lakeside hamlet at 2 a.m.
The electric vehicle is not just a plot device — it is the film's ticking clock. Every mile driven is a mile of battery range consumed. The audience always knows the charge level. The charge bar on the dashboard becomes as tension-generating as a bomb timer.
What are the film's themes?
Ordinary Vulnerability — Rick is not reckless. He did everything right and still ended up stranded. The film asks: how much control do any of us actually have over our circumstances?
Infrastructure & Trust — We depend on systems we do not build, maintain, or understand. A broken charger in a parking lot at midnight is a quiet portrait of how much modern life rests on things working.
Anxiety as Amplifier — Rick's fears are never quite confirmed or fully dismissed. The line between rational concern and spiraling panic is exactly where the film lives.
Fate & Perspective — The film's closing image reframes everything. The terrible night becomes a gift. The anxiety that felt like punishment was, in fact, protection. Rick's suffering was also his salvation.
What is the film's cinematic approach?
The film is essentially a single-actor road movie. Long stretches of near-silence broken by the sounds of the GPS, the charger's hum, and hold music. The camera stays close to Rick — his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the dashboard charge display, his breath fogging in cold night air.
The battery meter is always visible in frame when Rick is driving. Its decline is as carefully tracked as any countdown clock.
The Catskill sequences — the fog, the howls, the courthouse parking lot — are shot in deep darkness with minimal artificial light. The audience should feel, viscerally, what it means to be without signal, without charge, and without company in an unfamiliar place.
The return journey is brighter, more open. The fog lifts. The sun rises. Rick's face, lit by dawn, is one of the most earned images the film has to offer.
What films are comparable to Range Anxiety in tone and tension?
Locke (2013) — A single man, a car, a phone, an unraveling night. Intimate, suspenseful, character-driven.
Uncut Gems (2019) — Escalating anxiety, systems failing, a man at the mercy of circumstances beyond his control.
Nightcrawler (2014) — The nocturnal landscape of work-for-hire in a city that never fully sleeps.
After Hours (1985) — An ordinary man's catastrophic, absurdist night in unfamiliar territory.
Why This Story? Why Now?
Electric vehicles are no longer futuristic. They are ordinary. But the infrastructure that supports them — the chargers, the apps, the customer service lines — is still catching up. Range anxiety is a documented psychological phenomenon affecting EV drivers worldwide, and it will only grow more relevant as adoption accelerates.
Range Anxiety uses that infrastructure anxiety as a pressure cooker for something older and more universal: the fear of being lost, alone, and out of power — in every sense — in the middle of the night, far from home.
