Into the woods: "Hallow Road"

Hallow Road is Carpool Karaoke Locke, or Locke x State of the Union. Now we have a whole married couple in a car headed down a road to nowhere, responding via phone to a developing situation, often acting at crosspurposes, neither of them being in the most serene headspace as they strap themselves in. It is, after all, half past two in the morning when the Finches (Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike) receive a call from their distraught offspring Alice (Megan McDonnell), who stormed away from a family meal earlier that night and now tearfully admits to having knocked someone down on the B-roads of Norfolk. A paramedic by trade, Mrs. F takes control, steering Alice through various recovery manoeuvres over the speakerphone as she and her husband drive out into the wilds to intervene, but this crisis opens up pre-existing faultlines between the couple, who've been working different hours and keeping secrets from one another, and react to Alice's plight in different ways. (Even the simple lighting of a cigarette triggers some old tension.) Our eyes are drawn back to two readouts: the call duration on the phone clipped to the dashboard, ticking upwards as events at the accident scene take one turn after another, and the distance to location on Dad's satnav, coming rapidly down as Finches and film speed on into the night. The couple's internal data, by contrast, is scrambled, less than reliable, frankly all over the map.

We quickly grasp this is the British film industry's preferred shape of project: self-contained genre fare, lowish budget, two proven, reliable actors plonked inside a car (or replica thereof) for a brisk-seeming eighty minutes. Plonked behind the camera: Babak Anvari, obliged to maintain an even tighter focus than he did in his 2016 breakout Under the Shadow. (No other cars appear on the road at this time of night, and the underlit route the Finches take has the effect of casting the leads in near-darkness.) That formal tautness returns our attention to the writing and performances, which struck me as somewhere between brittle and shaky; I felt the illusion could shatter at any moment. Debutant William Gillies' screenplay crams a lot into this car's boot: stuff we haven't witnessed, stuff the Finches haven't yet spoken about, other business that emerges under duress. Steven Knight's script for Locke was far shrewder in rounding up a lot of smaller, relatively trivial things (an unplanned pregnancy, yes, but also the finer details of concrete pouring) which felt easier to swallow, even if - taken collectively - they drove the protagonist around the bend. Gillies comes up with one nicely British diversion, as the Finches awkwardly try to shoo off a pair of dogooders who've arrived at the accident scene before them, but pretty much everything else here is potentially lifechanging from the off. That has a knock-on effect on these performers, increasingly encouraged to bellow at one another in this confined space, where Tom Hardy, left (more or less) to his own devices, could improvise, modulate, go through the gears. Old hands Rhys and Pike can also steady matters whenever this script threatens to go completely awry, but there are still a lot of skids, and I really wasn't sure that the destination was worth all the turbulence. Locke was cinema; this tinnier rerun feels more like a radio play that missed its turning and has now driven into the oncoming traffic of the final Mission: Impossible movie.

Hallow Road is now playing in selected cinemas.