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A question arises during shivery new thriller Hallow Road. Do I actually need my eyes open for this? That sounds snarkier than it should. Visually, the film gives us Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, fine actors both. But the central conceit is that there is, by design, not much to see. The movie takes place almost entirely inside a moving car, in the dead of night, with all you need to know a matter of dialogue.
Well, sound at least. Before the journey proper begins, director Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow) sets our teeth on edge with the rasp of a dying smoke alarm. That definitive modern horror duly disturbs the middle-aged everycouple played by Pike and Rhys. It is 2am. Soon, they face another nightmare. Their teenage daughter phones from the local forest. Having stolen their car after a family row, she has hit and maybe killed another young woman.
Stay on the line, her parents say, frantically piling into a decrepit Range Rover. Rhys takes the wheel. Pike, cast as an off-duty paramedic, gives medical guidance. Lives hang suspended. The rest is the drive to the scene, a tale of dread and the satnav.
Even with two stars, Hallow Road’s economy of scale recalls the rash of single-actor films made after the 2008 financial crash. Back then we had Gravity (Sandra Bullock in space); Buried (Ryan Reynolds, a coffin); more relevant yet, Locke, with Tom Hardy taking a lone night drive down the M1. Here, Anvari works up a nicely clammy mood in his confined space, filled with panic and bickering. Now and then, the camera gooses us with a woozy zoom, or a shot of a dark England outside the window.
Mostly though, there is just the bare frame of the view from the dashboard. The lack of distraction can be unforgiving. Small implausibilities stack up. The nag of something not quite clicking extends to the actors. Pike is glassy, haunted and slightly miscast; Rhys brings anguished vim, but his part is somehow underwritten in a film with not much going on but the writing. By the time the story acquires an otherworldly edge, it has already begun to feel like a fairytale — or a perfectly decent radio play somehow morphed into a movie.
★★★☆☆
In cinemas from May 16
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