Hallow Road

I’m a bit of a film nerd, and I spend a lot of time keeping up to date with industry news and upcoming releases. It’s unusual when a film appears out of nowhere without me having seen countless teases and multiple trailers, but I genuinely hadn’t heard anything about HALLOW ROAD until I came across it in the listings for our local cinema. The trailer and premise interested me sufficiently to go and see it, and I’m very glad I did. It’s very good. Almost excellent.

Two parents enter a race against time when they receive a distressing late-night phone call from their daughter after she caused a tragic car accident.

The film, directed by BABAK ANVARI, stars the always excellent ROSAMUND PIKE and MATTHEW RHYS as the parents who are called by their daughter in the middle of the night and rush out to help her. We open on a series of grainy shots of the family home, littered with the detritus of an evening that appears not to have ended at all well. It’s no real spoiler to tell you that a) all is not good with this particular family unit, and b) things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Once they’ve received the call from their (always offscreen) daughter, the focus shifts to the inside of their car as the couple make the 40-or-so mile journey to the scene of the accident – deep in the woods on the titular Hallow Road. It was reminiscent of the STEVEN KNIGHT film LOCKE, another car-set movie in which TOM HARDY stars as a man whose life unravels in real time as he drives from Birmingham to London. It’s interesting how intense both LOCKE and HALLOW ROAD are. You’d think that the limited surroundings might restrict the storytelling and yet, in some ways, the tightness and claustrophobia add to the unease. HALLOW ROAD succeeds brilliantly because these two people, despite all their flaws (which are laid bare and explored in painful detail over the course of their journey), both want to help their child, but they’re disconnected from her by the impersonal nature of the telephone call and the restricted confines of their car. The distance between them feels endless.

It’s a sad indictment of the state of the media right now that films like HALLOW ROAD get only a handful of showings at a handful of cinemas, while conveyor belt horror movies, video game franchise films, and Disney live action remakes clog up the screens. There’s more originality in each frame of this movie than in some entire summer blockbusters, and I urge you to track it down and watch it.

I said in my opening paragraph that I thought HALLOW ROAD was almost brilliant, and I stand by that. Despite shedloads of tension, multiple twists and reveals, and two superb performances from the leads, it fell just short for me because the final act didn’t completely deliver. That apart, the ride to get to that conclusion more than justifies the price of admission. A real gem.