How encouraging that whatever state our film industry is considered to be in, it can still find space for a crackingly good script from a supersmart, disciplined first-timer who’s clearly been working on it for a while, planing down the edges and trimming away the fat through successive drafts. Hallow Road is the kind of property that often emerges after a spell on Hollywood’s “Black List” of much admired but as yet unproduced screenplays. It is a gripping, real-time suspense thriller with a twist of the macabre, a film about family guilt and the return of the repressed, written by National Film and Television School graduate William Gillies, a scary-movie enthusiast who here makes his feature script debut. British-Iranian film-maker Babak Anvari directs and Matthew Rhys andRosamund Pikegive forthright, excellent performances as the two leads.
Rhys plays Frank, a stressed executive married to Mads (Pike), a paramedic. They have one child, Alice, a troubled and vulnerable student played by Megan McDonnell who only appears in the film as a terrified voice on the end of the phone – that being a jarring contrast to her perky leave-a-message voice which her anguished parents keep reaching. Her smiling face which comes up on their phone is also, we can assume, a jarring contrast to her actual face.
Frank and Mads are tensely alone together in the family home, because Alice stormed off hours earlier after a colossal row, taking her dad’s car, driving down Hallow Road in the middle of a remote forest favoured by local youths as a location for weed-smoking, adored for its legendary associations with paganism. It is from there that the terrified Megan calls her mum; something terrifying has happened and her parents need to get there.
Almost the entirety of the film is taken up with Frank and Mads in Mads’s car, a kind of dashcam cinema which owes something toSteven Knight’s ultra-lo-fi Locke from 2014, which showed Tom Hardy as a construction engineer trying to rebuild his life from the wheel of his car with his mobile on speakerphone. They are frantically calling her, giving instructions, trying to keep it together, wheedling, being stern, rowing with each other, ineffectively suppressing their panic, changing their minds about what to do, at first content not to call an ambulance in case their beloved daughter gets into the kind of official trouble that will ruin her life and theirs, too. Frank, who has always spoiled and indulged Alice, starts planning a cover-up and as they get closer to the forest, they approach the dark centre of their own secrets.
A spoilsport might notice that Frank and Mads appear to be the last parents left in the UK who don’t monitor their child’s whereabouts on their “Find my Phone” app, but this is a really exhilarating, disturbing picture which foregrounds excellent writing and performances.
Hallow Road is in UK and Irish cinemas from 16 May.