‘Her face is changing…’
In 2013, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight wrote and directed Locke – a Tom Hardy vehicle that takes place entirely in a car and has one character. For my money, it’s the best thing that Knight ever put his name to. Hallow Road also takes place inside a car, and while it isn’t quite as effective as Locke, it’s still an utterly captivating (if occasionally ridiculous) psychological thriller…
Paramedic Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and her husband, Frank (Matthew Rhys), are awoken at 2am by a frantic phone call from their adult daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell). It appears that Alice has accidentally hit someone when driving through Ashdown Forest in Sussex and she is panicking. Nearly all of the rest of the film takes place inside the car of Maddie and Frank, with Alice just a disembodied voice at the other end of the line.
I’ve said a few times before on this blog that it is rare for a film to genuinely scare me. Well, I watched Hallow Road alone, while my own daughter slept upstairs, and I can tell you, dear reader, that there were moments within this film that I found to be genuinely disturbing. While the introduction of a new character at the start of the third act initially seems to derail the entire film, the twists and turns that the film then takes to justify this decision are genuinely thrilling and unsettling. This is the kind of film that actually made my chest tighten, and while the ending may be too ambiguous for some, I found it to be suitably devilish and macabre.
Hallow Road is a panic attack in cinematic form. The ending can be interpreted in two different ways, but both interpretations are utterly devoid of hope, and both are so disturbing that I genuinely had to watch an episode of The Simpsons to recover afterward. It’s a different type of dread, but watching this film is the most frightened I’ve been since I watched Skinamarink – high praise indeed.
