She’s Hilary, played very well by Makenzie Vega, best known as Grace Florrick from The Good Wife. She grew as an actress during the course of that show, and she’s great here; she’s a compelling enough presence during the slow setup at the start of the film, and when things really kick into gear in the final half hour, she’s a fantastic scream queen. She can shriek, she can run… and when her back’s against the wall, she can fight.

But that comes later. First, though, she spends much of the second act wandering around her home by herself, jumping at the wind and trying to convince herself it’s just the wind, and not the driver of the rusted old car she thinks she may have seen drive past the house earlier. The home-alone-waiting-for-the-scary-bits setup is reminiscent of House of the Devil, one of my favorite recent horror movies. While it does ramp up the suspense — since we know Hilary isn’t really the only person in the house — these scenes also help to get us intimately acquainted with the layout of the home. Later, when people are running and hiding and jumping out from behind closed doors, we don’t ever get lost or disoriented in the space — which is absolutely crucial for horror movies, and too often overlooked.

There’s a fun, grindhouse-y sensibility to the final act of the movie. It feels low-budget; the killer’s outfit especially feels like the costume designer went to a secondhand costume shop and picked the first vaguely-threatening thing they saw. But that’s part of what makes it so effective; we see that the Driver is a thrifty guy from the way he steals just enough money to pay for enough gas to get him to his next victim, so you believe that the Driver himself picked out the costume from a secondhand shop.

The score does a lot of work here, too; it’s quietly menacing in the scenes where she’s home alone, and during the final, violent, shocking scenes of the movie, it’s propulsive and atmospheric, recalling classic films like Halloween and, more recently, The Guest.

I have a particular love for road horror movies, like Joy Ride, The Hills Have Eyes, Wrong Turn, The Hitcher, etc. There’s something about road horror that feels quintessentially American to me. Our country is massive, and to get from one place to another, we often need to spend time out on the open road, with nothing but ourselves, our cars, the sound of our wheels on the blacktop… and strangers passing in the night. Strangers are scary. Strangers who can commit horrific atrocities, and then get in their cars and drive away… even scarier.

The Driver in this film is an embodiment of the malevolent, aimless evil running through America’s veins, slipping down the highway like a virus in our collective bloodstream. He’s there one day; he kills for gas money; and then he’s gone, on to the next unsuspecting victim. It’s tempting to read something political into his wanton disregard for human life in pursuit of gas for his car, and especially into the fact that the family he attacks in this film is a Hispanic family, whereas the Driver is a blonde, white man. It’s tempting, but I’m not sure there’s quite enough in the film to fashion any coherent statement out of those pieces.

That’s okay. Fender Bender doesn’t do anything particularly new with the road horror genre, but not everything has to. Sometimes, doing something well — in this case, delivering the promised shocks and scares after a restrained setup — is perfectly good enough.