★★★ (3 out of 4)
Two people talking in a car. Hardly the stuff of white-knuckle drama, right? It is when you hitch two phenomenal actors, Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, to a suspenseful script by William Gillies and tightly coiled direction by Babak Anvari, and then stand back and let them rip.
For the 80 minutes it takes for “Hallow Road” to detonate on screen (it’s playing at a theater near you), you might not be able to breathe. And I haven’t even told you about an ending that will turn your head around six ways from Sunday. Actually, I’ll never tell you. You’d hate me if I spoiled it. But I can give you the setup.
A minimalist thriller that puts your nerves into maximum overdrive
It’s late at night. Paramedic Maddie (Pike) and her marketing director husband Frank (Rhys) have just gotten a frantic call from their teen daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell since we only hear her on the phone). Something terrible has happened. Not the major fight they just had at dinner. This is afterwards, when Alice took dad’s car and sped off into the country dark.
Alice says she hit a girl who ran out into the road. What should she do? As Maddie and Frank hop in her car on the way to the scene—it will take most of the film’s brief running time with the camera switching from film to digital inside the car—she delivers CPR instructions into the phone. Alice’s parents have very different ideas on how to proceed, but the main one is to help keep the girl alive until help arrives.
Or wait a minute. If they call the police, the result could ruin Alice’s future. If they don’t, they might be culpable. Every festering conflict Maddie and Frank have ever had as a couple suddenly comes to the surface. It’s not pretty in that car, though Anvari— the British-Iranian director whose 2016 debut with “Under the Shadow” put him on the map—teams with cinematographer Kit Fraser to turn claustrophobia into an art form. I felt like choking.
I also thought of another movie. It’s 2014’s “Locke,” starring an incendiary Tom Hardy as a dude driving alone in his BMW from Birmingham to London to a meeting that might change his future while taking calls in real time from friends and frenemies. It’s a hell of a movie, but nothing compared to the wallop of “Hallow Road” with the pure pow of Pike and Rhys at the wheel.
Audiences hunting for movies with wide open spaces and room to pack in dozens of the usual suspects will probably feel constricted by the squeezing intensity of “Hallow Road.” Only the strong are likely to survive the pressure points mercilessly applied in this one.
Anvari is hunting bigger game in this minimalist thriller that puts your nerves into maximum overdrive. Spinning artfully from suspenser to Grimm’s fairytale to ancient dark myth, “Hallow Road,” running hot in time to the beats of the synth score by Lorne Balfe and Peter Adams, takes you places you don’t see coming. Isn’t that everything you’d want in a thriller with the power to invade your waking nightmares? My advice: fasten your seatbelts and hang on.