This thriller with a supernatural twist is the kind of chilling story that is meat and (mainly) drink to those propping up the bar in an isolated pub during a late-night lock-in.
It stars the always excellent Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys as middle-class husband and wife Maddie and Frank who receive a distressing call in the middle of the night from their daughter Alice. She has knocked someone over while driving through East Sussex’s Ashdown Forest. The parents leap into their car and drive at an oddly sensible speed to their distressed daughter while talking to her on speakerphone.
Maddie is a paramedic and at Frank’s behest attempts to talk Alice through artificial respiration techniques until the ambulance arrives. Then it transpires Alice has not dialled 999 after all.
British-Iranian director Babak Anvari sustains a claustrophobic tension by keeping the camera inside the car with the parents as they bicker and fight over the best way to help their daughter. As there is no one at the accident, Frank resolves to take the blame for killing the girl, thereby saving his daughter, whose Maddie’s questioning has revealed was high on drugs when it happened.
There is though a price paid for sticking so rigorously to the idea of telling a story almost entirely from within the confines of a car. Although it is implied that Ashdown Forest is an ancient area brimful of spooky lore and myth, Anvari only uses generic shots of shadowy woodland to convey the psychodrama attached to this geography. The forest itself, one feels, is an underdrawn character who deserves better from William Gillies’s screenplay.
Still, next to Rhys’s slightly flaky dad, Pike’s steely Maddie channels the kind of strength of character you want on your side in a crisis. God forbid that any parent experiences this one though.
Hallow Road
Classification: 15
★★★
