TEST DRIVE

Mitchell Lazar’s "Test Drive" feels like the cinematic equivalent of a locked car suddenly jolting to life — precise, contained, yet coursing with unexpected electricity. Across its tight 17-minute runtime, the film delivers far more than a simple premise would suggest. A car salesman and a customer go for a drive — that’s all you need to know. But what unfolds is a slow, stylish burn of suspicion, charm, and danger that accelerates with unnerving precision.

Jack isn’t your typical salesman. There’s something measured about him — a man accustomed to control, to reading people, to steering the conversation as easily as he steers a car. Montana (Ramon Nuñez), by contrast, drifts through the story with an easy magnetism, a kind of youthful spontaneity that feels almost too relaxed for what’s coming. Their chemistry doesn’t just carry the film — it becomes its pulse. Every exchange between them vibrates with tension and subtext, hinting that neither man is quite who he claims to be.

Perhaps what stands out the most about the short is its sense of momentum. Sam Downey’s screenplay operates like a trap disguised as a handshake: familiar at first, then slowly tightening. Each turn — a detour, an errand, a disappearance — nudges the story further from comfort, until you realise you’re no longer watching a test drive at all, but something closer to an emotional hijacking. There’s a pleasure in how the film refuses to define itself. It slides between tones — from comedic awkwardness to genuine peril — without ever feeling forced.

Petr Cikhart’s cinematography does something quietly impressive: it refuses to let the short feel small. There’s a fluidity to his work — the way the camera glides through motion, how reflections and windows become emotional punctuation marks — that makes the world feel expansive even as the story tightens around two men in a car. Every frame gleams with intent, evoking the polish of prestige television while retaining the intimacy of independent filmmaking.

By the time the film hits its final stretch, Lazar’s confidence as a director becomes undeniable. The tension between control and chaos — between who’s driving and who’s being driven — comes to a head in a way that feels both inevitable and startling.

When the police appear, and Jack makes a split-second decision that could undo everything, the film stops being about a car and becomes about consequence.

"Test Drive" is the rare short that doesn’t just entertain — it invites curiosity. It leaves you wanting to linger in its world, to follow these characters beyond the frame. As a proof-of-concept for Dukes of Kingston, it’s exactly the kind of groundwork that earns expansion. Lazar proves he can orchestrate tone, character, and tension with real cinematic weight — the mark of a storyteller ready for a longer road.