One could programme a brief, claustrophobic festival featuring movies set almost entirely within the same car. Abbas Kiarostami had two: 10 and Taste of Cherry. His Iranian colleague Penah Panahi just about qualifies with Hit the Road. You have Tom Hardy worrying his way through Steven Knight’s Locke. Such films have things to say about how we fill up such spaces with our anxieties. There is nowhere to storm if the emotions get heightened.
With this tense, original Irish coproduction, Babak Anvari, the British-Iranian director of the fine horror Under the Shadow, delivers a minor classic in this sparse genre (if we can call it that). Beginning in domestic drama before moving somewhere distinctly more peculiar, Hallow Road successfully invites us to ask “Hang on, what is this thing?” on more than one occasion. Not everyone will be happy with the eventual destination, but the film-makers’ chutzpah cannot be denied.
We begin with a camera crawling about the apparently comfortable home of Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys). There are some signs of disturbance: broken glass, abandoned food. A ringing telephone breaks the nocturnal silence, and the couple are propelled into an increasingly confusing nightmare. Their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell), on the other end of the line, explains that, driving through woods, she knocked over a woman who now appears close to death. It transpires that Alice had a fight with her parents and took off in a huff.
Now in their car on the way, they hope, to the scene of the accident, the parents try to manage the situation by phone. Maddie, a health professional, explains how to perform CPR. (I had always been told you massage to the tempo of the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive, but she prefers Nellie the Elephant.) Frank, learning that Alice may have been on drugs, decides he will claim that he was the one who knocked down the girl. All this unfolds within the unforgiving prison of two front seats.
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The opening 20 minutes play out like a social study of how far parents will go to protect their children. Maddie and Frank are not blind to the tragedy, but, as events escalate, saving Alice from disgrace emerges as the greater priority. This is the sort of challenge any half-alive actor would savour – later developments offer further demands we shan’t hint at – and the pair here work hard to inject tension and unease into each enclosed crisis. Pike has a firmness that speaks to her character’s everyday resolve. Rhys gives us a man untethered by sudden mortal terror.
As the car drives deeper into the woods, however, the story drifts somewhere altogether more peculiar. A mysterious women appears at the scene of the accident and takes to hectoring in a voice somewhere between impatient schoolteacher and bitter grandparent. (“What kind of parents are you?” is the implied question.) In these later stages the logic behind the film‘s structural conceit becomes plain. Knowing about the aftermath of the accident from only what we hear on the telephone, we are forced to construct our own unreliable version. One governing explanation does eventually announce itself, but a dozen viewers will have a dozen takes.
Hallow Road has its flaws. As is the case with most films set in real time, a little too much happens a little too quickly; a few too many family crises spill out just a little too easily. But William Gillies’s taut script sets the action at an oblique angle to mundane reality. Few so economical features – 80 minutes, with only three significant characters – have had such unsettling fun in the dark, dark woods. Don’t let it slip you by.
In cinemas from Friday, May 16th
