17/05/25

Cineworld, Edinburgh

In an era where we’re increasingly led to believe that, to be successful, a motion picture requires a massive special-effects budget and a cast of thousands, Hallow Road provides solid evidence that this doesn’t have to be the case. Essentially a micro-budget two-hander, the drama unfolds almost entirely inside a moving car – and I’d need to go back to 2013’s Locke to find another film with comparable DNA.

But director Babak Anvari and debut screenwriter William Gillies have created a taut, compelling psychological thriller that has me hooked from the word go – and on the edge of my (driving) seat right up to the final scene.

We open on a series of clues: the aftermath of an interrupted dinner. Meals are left unfinished, glasses are still half full of wine. Then we meet Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and her husband, Frank (Matthew Rhys), and we learn that they sat down earlier that evening for a meal with their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell). There was a heated row and Alice left the house, jumped into Frank’s car and drove away into the night.

Now, in the early hours of the morning, Alice – who for the purposes of this drama is never more than a disembodied voice on the phone – calls Maddie in a state of absolute terror. Driving along Hallow Road, deep in a forest, she has hit – and possibly killed – a young woman. Frank and Maddie bundle frantically out into the night, in the family’s second car, start heading for their daughter at speed. Maddie, a trained paramedic, attempts to talk Alice through the complexities of CPR; Frank, on the other hand, wants to find a solution to the problem and is more than ready to take the rap for the accident, provided he can get there before anyone else.

The journey plays out, more or less in real time…

And no, this doesn’t exactly sound like the ingredients for a spell-binding narrative, yet Hallow Road ticks all the boxes, amping up the suspense with every passing mile, until I am almost breathless with anxiety. I can’t say much more about what happens from this point other than to mention that, in its latter stages, the film seamlessly achieves an intriguing genre-jump into the realms of folk horror and offers a conclusion that I really don’t see coming.

Both Pike and Rhys give wonderfully nuanced performances, pulling us in to this conceit with consummate skill, while McDonnell manages to convey a whole world of bewilderment and terror through her very effective voice performance. And if you’re thinking that a small-scale film like this will be just as effective on streaming, let me add that cinematographer Kit Fraser’s wonderfully atmospheric night-time visions deserve to be seen on the biggest screen you can find.

5 stars

Philip Caveney