Two terrific performances anchor this taut, contained thriller which will no doubt provoke strong reactions once it comes out.
PLOT: Two parents (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) receive a panicked phone call from their college-age daughter, who’s just hit and killed someone while intoxicated on a remote road. The two rush to her while grappling with the decision about how to handle a situation that will likely land her in prison and ruin her life.
REVIEW: How far would you go to protect your children? That’s the question Babak Anvari’s (Under the Shadow) Hallow Road asks. While it’s a familiar one, what makes Hallow Road unique is that the parents in this movie aren’t necessarily racing to save their children from an external force but rather from a deadly calamity of their own making.
Running a taut eighty minutes, Hallow Road takes place mostly in a car, as Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys race the clock to drive out to the remote road of the title to save their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell), who’s just made the biggest mistake of her life, fresh off of having a massive blow-out with her folks. What’s unique about the movie is how flawed everyone is, with Alice no pure-hearted victim, as she’s willing to do what she has to avoid paying the consequences of her own actions.
Of course, something happens about halfway through the film, which brings it more in line with Anvari’s other, more genre-based films, when it becomes something of a morality tale/ fable about the protective gene baked into parents, which provokes them to do amoral things to save their children. It asks you to consider the fact that, by constantly protecting children from the consequences of their own actions, you wind up with kids who, even as adults, still rely on their parents for everything and have little to no scruples of their own.
It’s a terrifically paced two-hander, with Pike and Rhys superb in their roles. Of the two, Pike is playing the slightly more conscientious parent, being a burnt-out paramedic who has some empathy for Alice’s victim. By contrast, Rhys’s character is solely focused on getting their daughter out of danger; consequences to himself (or anyone else) be damned.
Yet, the movie also doesn’t judge either of the parents, allowing you to make up your own mind about their actions. Pike and Rhys are two of the best in the biz, and throughout the scant running time, they give a masterclass in acting, with this one of the best-contained thrillers in recent memory.
However, the more genre-based twist seems prone to divide audiences a bit. While I was watching it, I wasn’t sure it entirely worked, but a mid-credits Easter egg changed my opinion as I walked out of the screening. Since it ended, it’s a movie that I’ve been chewing on, having made a bigger impression on me than I initially thought.
Anvari does an excellent job keeping the film visually interesting despite the contained nature of the film. One really cool addition to the film is the score by Lorne Balfe and Peter Adams, which uniquely uses a symphonic rendition of the Depeche Mode classic “Behind the Wheel” as the movie’s main theme. As a major DM fan, I found this aspect delicious.
It’ll be interesting to see how genre fans react to Hallow Road when it comes out. While it’s not directly labeled as a supernatural thriller, there are elements of that at play here, and they work quite well. The movie almost felt like a feature-length version of a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode, albeit done with a lot of style. It’s the kind of morality tale a guy like Rod Serling would have appreciated.
