When their daughter is involved in a car accident, a married couple rush to the scene, a sinister stretch of country road.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Babak Anvari
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell
Babak Anvari's Hallow Road is the latest entry in the growing sub-genre of movies in which a single protagonist spends the running time communicating with unseen supporting characters over the phone. The best recent examples of this form are the Tom Hardy vehicle Locke, the Danish thriller The Guilty and the Aussie sci-fi Monolith, but you might argue that such films are all the children of Oliver Stone's 1988 movie Talk Radio.
Hallow Road bucks the trend by giving us not one but two emotionally frazzled protagonists in Frank (Matthew Rhys) and Maddie (Rosamund Pike), a married couple who receive a phone call at 2am from their 18-year-old daughter Alice (a voice-only performance from Megan McDonnell). Earlier in the evening Alice had stormed out following an argument, taking Frank's car in the process. Now she's in desperate need of help, having run over a young woman on the dark country lane that provides the film's title.
The movie plays out in something close to real time as Frank and Maddie race to the scene in the latter's unreliable car. Communicating with their daughter via speaker phone, the couple clash over how to approach the tense situation. Maddie, a paramedic (Pike is unfeasibly posh for such a role), tries to talk Alice through administering CPR while Frank implores his kid to leave the young woman, presuming she's already dead and not wanting to cause Alice any further trauma. Then a moral debate arises. Maddie wants to call the police, warning that the longer they refuse to do so the more trouble it will ultimately cause their daughter. Frank comes up with a half-baked plan to attempt to take the blame himself.
As this is from the director of Under the Shadow and Wounds, we assume the film will take a supernatural twist at some point, but unfortunately the movie begins to run out of gas when this element is awkwardly introduced. The nature of the storytelling means it devolves into telling us we should be scared rather than actually showing us something scary, with a fourth character (also voiced by Pike) dishing out some clunky monologues that take the film into the realm of folk-horror. Hallow Road also suffers from the one character who is in most danger - Alice - being portrayed exclusively as a voice on the other end of a phone, meaning the bread and butter scares and suspense of the horror genre are unable to be deployed. The sound design never leaves us in any doubt that we're listening to voices from a professional recording studio rather than a late night country road, with a distinct lack of atmos (not so much as a breeze is heard from Alice's end of the line).
Hallow Road is far more effective in its earlier portion when it's a more grounded thriller focussed on two distressed parents trying to make the most of an awful situation that has befallen their child. It raises issues regarding the value of the life of a loved one versus that of a stranger, and it forces us to contemplate how far we might be willing to compromise our own values to save our child's life from being ruined.
Movies with this limited setup rely heavily on the quality of acting, and Pike and Rhys certainly deliver here. Any argument that this might work just as well as a radio play are rendered null and void by how good the pair are in Frank and Maddie's moments of silent but frantic contemplation. If William Gillies' script is often unwieldy and on the nose, Pike and Rhys add nuance and tangible humanity to their troubled characters. Unfortunately the movie takes a turn down a supernatural laneway that the otherwise impressive leads struggle to convincingly sell, and the final twist leads us down an anti-climactic cul de sac. But thanks to Pike and Rhys, the journey is just about worth taking.
Hallow Road is on UK/ROI VOD now.
