A lonely stretch of a road continues forward into the seemingly endless horizon. It’s a deserted stretch of a highway in the middle of nowhere, framed by cacti and dirt. It’s desolate. Dark. Filmed in an almost sepia-tone black and white, it feels downright ominous. And the howls of thunder in the distance aren’t just literal thunderstorms ahead.

The only other thing that exists is a taxicab, driving down the center of the empty road. The cab belongs to Harris (Gino Anthony Pesi). To pass the time, Harris skims through the radio, listening to radio hosts discussing time-traveling aliens messing up our reality, or critiques of toxic masculinity that frames men as conquerors throughout time or the need for intimacy between lovers.

His Dispatcher (Jason Stuart) has sent him into the middle of nowhere for his latest fare: a woman with a bright smile named Penny “Just Like the Coin” (Brinna Kelly). She gets in the car and they strike up a familiar and comfortable conversation that ranges from how long he’s been a taxi driver (16 years) to her career as a dance instructor (The kind where you take your clothes off, she tells him).

A thunderstorm looms ahead and there’s a sudden flash and Penny has disappeared. Confused and concerned, Harris discovers he can’t take his seatbelt off. When he radios dispatch, he’s told to just come home. With a swell of music, he resets the meter and we’re back to listening to radio announcers discuss reality-shifting aliens.

“Are they aliens, Bob? Or are they us?”

He’s on his way to pick up his latest fare, a woman with a bright smile named Penny. And this time the conversation veers in a similar yet slightly different directions. Harris doesn’t realize we’ve been down this road until he accidentally touches her hand and the monochrome bursts into warm and bright colors.

“Harris. Remember me this time,” Penny pleads as she vanishes.

What follows is an almost entirely two person narrative, as we follow Harris’s purgatorial journey through a nighttime desert. Written by the lead actress Brinna Kelly, The Fare is a tender and touching romance that succeeds mostly because of the strength of the high concept script and the unabashed chemistry between Brinna and Gino. So much of the film relies on the repartee between the two leads and it feels lived in and natural, even as the situation they’ve found themselves in is anything but.

The Fare is at its best when it’s the two characters getting to know each other, spilling secrets and dreams and reveling in their shared history of the taxi ride. There’s this interesting push/pull where Harris starts to think that maybe it’s best that they are stuck in this time loop forever. After all, Penny, is stuck in a marriage of convenience in the world outside the cab. Harris, meanwhile, had one great love that fell apart and his life has been a mess since then. But in this cab, where they can share their deepest secrets, they have each other and a love for the ages.

It doesn’t all work, though. The structure of the film gives the narrative inherent pacing issues. For every conversation that digs into truth and witty banter, there’s more that feel like tires spinning. And as the film crests into the third act and some of the truths are revealed, the pacing grinds to a halt. In this way, it feels like a brilliant Twilight Zone episode stretched to feature film length. Which is a shame because if it weren’t operating on a standard 80-90 minute feature run time, I think it would be a perfect experience.

That said, I was swept up by the love story here and the way the narratives goes into some surprising and heavy thematic directions. But even as the narrative dips its toes into a more sinister explanation for what’s happening to our two characters, it’s the romance and chemistry between Harris and Penny that keeps it grounded. The denouement made me a little misty-eyed. It’s a very sad story, truth be told.

But then, as Penny would say, “love stories usually are.”