I’m Starting To Worry About This Black Box of Doom

Pargin’s (John Dies at the End) hilarious road-trip thriller is a delightful yet thoughtful satire of modern online and real-world anxieties. Lyft driver Abbott meets a mysterious woman named Ether, who hires him to drive her and a mysterious black box across the country. This job requires Abbott to surrender his credit cards, his smartphone, and his curiosity, as he is warned that he can never ask what’s in the box. It turns out that many people are pursuing the box, including a scary-looking biker, an ex-FBI agent, and people on the internet who believe the box might contain a bomb, a human corpse, or even an alien corpse. Pargin forgoes cosmic weirdness, delivering a charming yet timely tale about how misinformation and paranoia spread like a virus. There are plenty of thrills, but the story’s true impact stems from its quirky yet lovable characters, especially the unlikely hero Abbott, whose pathos and neuroses are perfectly portrayed by narrator Ari Fliakos.