Have you heard Chris DeBurgh’s Don’t Pay The Ferryman?

It’s my favorite song of his and is pretty self-explanatory (it revolves around a someone taking a ferry being admonished to not pay before it arrives at it’s destination and to “beware that hooded old man at the rudder.”) in terms of what the song is about.

It’s this (relative) simplicity of the song that allows it to be interpreted in different ways.

It shares this trait, as well as being thematically similar, to the upcoming movie The Toll, which if the trailer is at all accurate – that’s worth mentioning because they can be used to misdirect as well as inform – seems to revolve around a woman and her ride share who inadvertently end up traveling a road warded over by a mysterious Slender Man-type figure who demands payment, a toll, of a sort.

It’s this seeming simplicity that makes it more effective because too often these days movies seem as if they have to imposed a forced complexity on viewers, as if being convoluted for the sake of being convoluted matters more than good storytelling.