Hallow Road

Film Bouquets 2025

2025 has been a rewarding year for cinema-goers, with enough great movies to make it especially difficult to narrow our list down to just twelve favourites. But here they are in the order that we watched them. As ever, we invite you to pitch in with your comments.

Better Man

“A fabulous piece of filmmaking that effortlessly oversteps the relative simplicity of its subject to create something genuinely spectacular…”

The Brutalist

“Has plenty to say about the creative process and nails perfectly the powerful seduction that success offers to any artist – the fateful allure of patronage and its unpalatable compromises.”

Flow

“The word ‘masterpiece’ is overused but this groundbreaking animation by Latvian director Glints Zilbalodis is so accomplished, it’s all too easy to see why it was handed an Oscar.

Hallow Road

“Hallow Road ticks all the boxes, amping up the suspense with every passing mile, until I am almost breathless with anxiety…”

28 Years Later

“There are elements of folk horror woven into the script and the eerie atmosphere is beautifully accentuated by the music of the Young Fathers and the use of an old recording of Rudyard Kipling’s militaristic poem, Boots…”

The Ballad of Wallis Island

“A warm, gentle hug of a film, one that takes a long look at the subject of relationships and the many ways in which memories can still affect people long after an initial attraction has gone…”

Weapons

“An absolute smorgasbord of delights, by turns poignant, tense, bloody and, in its later stretches, darkly comic…”

Frankenstein

“Packed with sumptuous locations and thrilling action set-pieces, that have it hurtling through its lengthy running time…”

One Battle After Another

“Even the car chase is given a mesmerising makeover, as vehicles glide silently through a shimmering waterfall of desert roads like some kind of LSD-induced hallucination…”

Sorry, Baby

“Film-making of the highest order, assured and nuanced, highlighting the myriad moments that mark Agnes’s darkest hours as well as their recovery…”

Die, My Love

“This unflinching study of a woman’s postpartum psychological breakdown is as compelling as it is harrowing – and Jennifer Lawrence is frankly wonderful in the lead role…”

Bugonia

“The film’s true triumph is only revealed in a final extended sequence, where Lanthimos brings all the different strands of the story together to create a shattering, thought-provoking conclusion…”

Philip Caveney & Susan Singfield

Hallow Road

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