15-05-2025
Hallow Road: Rosamund Pike faces every parent's worst nightmare in this absurd thriller
Mobile phones have a well-known power to ruin films, if someone's texting or (worse) scrolling in your field of vision. On screen, they can be even more of a menace. Exhibit A is Hallow Road, a suspense thriller that essentially relays all its tension by speaker-phone. Eighty minutes ought to be a tight frame for this sort of hokum, which takes no effort to watch, but the only thing that escalates is how silly it is.
Two Middle England parents, not given names but embodied with pained intensity by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, have just had a furious row with their pregnant daughter, who has stormed out and driven off into the night. Somewhere in the woods, about a 45-minute drive away, she has knocked down a pedestrian, while possibly high on drugs, and calls them up hysterically to sort things out.
Pike happens to be a paramedic, who tries to talk her through CPR, while Rhys drives them both as quickly as possible to the scene. They assume emergency services will beat them there, but it could well be that their daughter – a snivelling problem child we never see, but hear panicking plenty – is telling porkies on that front.
There's some thematic ambition to the piece: writer-director Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow; Wounds; I Came By) is evidently thinking about parental responsibility, and the point where protective instincts might snap under duress. Pike and Rhys take it as seriously as they can, but the camera is given to interludes of just wafting over their anxious faces, and there's nothing they can do about a big daft crunch in the sound mix when CPR goes wrong and the victim's ribs cave in.
Much is left to the imagination here – Anvari may be aiming for the slippery logic of a Grimm's fable. At the same time, his overeager screenplay spells out too much. What should be the sore aftermath to a familial bust-up has the telltale ring of a recap.
The writing is several drafts away from being jagged or suggestive the way Anvari's terrific Under the Shadow was – it's stuck being blunt and obvious. As for the twist, it's too risible to be disturbing. The mystery vocal performances flaunted in the end credits give it a campy Twilight Zone quality that sends you out bemused.
In cinemas now
