Hallow Road
Hallow Road, directed by Babak Anvari, employs the same few elements, only – and with apologies to concrete enthusiasts – with even higher stakes: at the other end of the phone line is a panicked girl and the body of a young woman she's just run over in the dead of night on a forest road. Can her parents reach her in time, is the woman still alive, and will the trio make the right decisions along the way?
If you don't immediately assume the answer to at least one of those is 'no', you've not seen Anvari's terrific debut Under the Shadow, which unleashed a malevolent djinn on a mum and daughter in wartorn Tehran. The British-Iranian filmmaker does not do happy families. And this taut morality tale even adds a jittery edge of superstition and folky horror to the mix.
It opens with a deceptively serene tableau: a half-eaten stew on the kitchen table of a rural home; two parents – Rosamund Pike's Maddie and Matthew Rhys's Frank – asleep in separate rooms at 2am. Then Maddie's phone rings and the panicked voice of the pair's 18-year-old daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell) fills in the gaps: there's been an argument, Alice has stormed off in dad's car and hit a young woman in the woods.
The British-Iranian filmmaker does not do happy families
The screenplay, by first-timer William Gillies, seeds the scenario with tensions from the get-go. Why hasn't Maddie serviced her car, grumbles Frank. Whose fault was the argument in the first place? Then we're strapped in and racing to the woods – 40 minutes away – as Maddie, a paramedic, tries to talk her daughter through CPR over speakerphone and the het-up Frank simmers behind the wheel.
By keeping the camera in the vehicle, hauntingly lit with the blur of passing houses and the glow of the mobile phone, Hallow Road invites you to fill the scene at the other end of the line with a shadowy menace that the final stretch really delivers on. And there's some truly whelp-inducing sound design thrown in as the panicking Alice attempts resuscitation.
But the crux of the drama lies with the two parents, played with real feeling by Pike and Rhys. You can sense how their fraying marriage deprives their shared concerns for their daughter of any unity; how the miles are clocking down more slowly than their cortisol levels are cranking up. Pike, in particular, is terrific as a woman torn between her instincts as a mother and a medical professional – two caregiving roles suddenly in conflict.
How far would you go to protect your child? Hopefully it'll never need to be as far as this.
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