Hallow Road starring Rosamund Pike is a taut car-crash thriller... until it hits the plotholes, writes BRIAN VINER
Hallow Road (15 hours and 18 minutes)
Those of you who are or have ever been the parent of a young, college-age adult will probably watch the excellent first 40 or so minutes of Hallow Road and think: what on earth would I do?
It's an agonising moral dilemma wrapped up as a taut thriller, brilliantly performed by Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys and the unseen Megan McDonnell.
Babak Anvari's film begins grippingly. In disconcerting silence the camera roams through a house, picking out clues of a crime or perhaps a furious argument: an unfinished dinner, a smashed wine glass half-swept up.
Soon we learn it was the latter, a domestic barney, which appears to have ended with a young woman storming out and driving into the night in her father's car.
Waking in the small hours, Mads (Pike) and Frank (Rhys) are at first concerned only about the whereabouts of their daughter Alice (McDonnell).
But then she calls with the alarming news that there has been an accident; driving through a forest, along Hallow Road, she has hit a woman of about her age. The woman seems to be dying.
Aghast, Mads and Frank set off to find her, Frank driving Mads's car while she stays in contact with Alice by mobile phone, talking her through the mechanics of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Handily, Mads is a paramedic. She has given Alice CPR training before but performing it for real is another matter.
The clever screenplay by William Gillies is full of counterpoints, moments of dissonance between the horror of this situation and life's cheerful banalities. So when Alice doesn't answer her mobile, her bubbly voicemail message, ending with a chirpy 'byeee', is like a cruel mirage, an unattainable happiness.
And when Mads explains how to do chest compressions, she reminds Alice to chant 'Nellie the Elephant' as a way of keeping up the tempo.
As all this unfolds, we learn bits and pieces about their family life, the crisis that led to the argument, the secret Mads is keeping from Frank, other causes of friction.
We also hear how Frank plans to protect Alice in the police investigation that will likely follow, which leads to that quandary: what would the rest of us do in such a predicament?
Only at the start and the end, however, do we stray from the car's interior. In many respects, Hallow Road is strongly reminiscent of Steven Knight's terrific 2013 thriller Locke, which similarly used a single car journey and a series of phone conversations to ramp up the tension.
Locke was only 85 minutes long and Hallow Road is even shorter, so it could easily keep on a linear narrative path, but instead, about halfway through, it takes a regrettable swerve into vaguely supernatural territory.
Before Mads and Frank can reach their daughter, another car stops and a woman gets out, apparently to help Alice.
We hear her talking on Alice's phone, but at no point does she convince either as a good Samaritan or a more sinister entity. After that I stopped fully believing in the story. What a shame that Hallow Road develops plotholes.
The Marching Band (15 hours and 103 minutes)
Rating:
How many movies are driven by family dynamics? The Marching Band, a French-language crowd-pleaser, does it in a very different way.
Benjamin Lavernhe is wonderful as middle-class Thibaut, a celebrated conductor who, after collapsing at the podium one day, learns that he has leukaemia. He needs a bone-marrow transplant but it turns out that his sister isn't a match. Then comes another life-changing revelation: he was adopted.
So Thibaut must first find his biological brother, Jimmy (the also splendid Pierre Lottin, far left with Lavernhe), and then ask him for his bone marrow. All of which is drama enough, but there's another, compelling dimension. Jimmy, raised in a blue-collar community, is a talented trombonist in a marching band.
Gradually, their worlds converge and their new fraternal bond builds through music, predictably but very touchingly. It's a real charmer.
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