‘Hallow Road’ Review: Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys Are Riveting in Claustrophobic Real-Time Parental Nightmare

David Rooney-The Hollywood Reporter

Mon, March 10, 2025

?British Iranian director Babak Anvari’s best film since his sensational 2016 debut feature?Under the Shadow?is about as lean and mean as they come.

?For most of its run time,?Hallow Road?unfolds in a car, as anxious parents respond to a distressed call from their college-age daughter, speeding through the night to get to her in time to help.

Essentially a two-hander, the movie might have been merely a minimalist exercise — albeit an impressive one — in mounting dread.

?But high-intensity performances from Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys elevate the suspenseful thriller, its psychological grounding gradually expanding into a darker mythic realm.

The setup, in William Gillies’ taut debut screenplay, is brisk and economical.

As DP Kit Fraser’s camera slowly prowls around a house, we see an uneaten dinner on the table and broken glass on the floor, suggesting an argument that cut short family mealtime. Maddie (Pike) is awoken by the piercing electronic sound of a smoke alarm battery alert, which fails to wake her husband, Frank (Rhys), asleep in another room.

But when Maddie responds to a 2 a.m. call from their distraught daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell), Frank soon snaps to attention.

It quickly emerges that Maddie, who is living away from home at college, came back to share some important news with her parents and ask for their advice.

?Their adverse reactions sparked a fight, after which Alice bolted from the house and sped off in her father’s car.

?Hours later, Alice says she was driving through a forest outside the city on an unlit road when a young woman of roughly her same age ran out from the woods and directly into the path of her car.

That casualty is now lying on the road, possibly dead.

The family dynamic is deftly sketched as Maddie takes in details from Alice and shoots back instructions, ignoring Frank’s alarmed requests to know what’s going on.

?Maddie is an experienced paramedic, so she automatically assumes control, with Frank struggling to get a word in.

?While the delineations are never so simplistic, there’s a suggestion that he’s accustomed to playing good cop to his wife’s bad cop, and that Alice has a pattern of throwing herself into their hands to sort out whatever mess she’s gotten herself into.

As the cellphone conversation continues in the car, the circumstances grow more urgent.

?Alice, who hasn’t been completely honest with her folks, becomes more hysterical and Maddie and Frank more argumentative over their conflicting views as to the best course of action.

?Maddie wants to call the police; Frank wants to get to Alice and protect his daughter before the authorities arrive, even if it means constructing a lie.

Gillies’ script poses interesting questions about the lengths to which a parent will go to keep their child safe and whether that helps or hinders the formation of young adults.

Anvari shows considerable skill at keeping the plot’s wheels spinning despite the confined situation.

?That goes double for Pike and Rhys, bathed in the dim glow of the dashboard and GPS, the red of the traffic lights or the amber of the streetlamps.

Fraser’s restless camera angles frame them in ways that seem a direct reflection of their agitated minds.

The two actors’ incisive characterizations spark off each other with a constantly shifting energy — volatile and aggressive one minute, utterly defeated the next.

Their disagreements point to a strain in the marriage. It emerges that Maddie has been struggling to bounce back from a bad decision at work, which has made her more brittle and closed-off.

All this remains surprisingly compelling, fueling an unsettling feeling as their destination seems to get no closer despite Frank’s constant reassurances that they are almost there.

Anvari and Gillies ratchet up the tension several notches by introducing another car on the road with Alice, prompting more rash decisions.

A woman and her husband stop to offer help, and the woman remains oddly insistent despite Alice’s assurances that her parents will be there soon.

The stranger starts talking of Hallow Road, which runs through the deepest part of the forest, as sacred ground in the myths and legends of the area — identified only with fictitious names but clearly somewhere in the U.K. or Ireland.

?The meddlesomeness of the woman, who like Alice is heard only over the speaker phone and remains unseen, initially seems driven by concern.

But her tone becomes more insinuating, even accusatory, both with Alice and with Maddie and Frank on the phone.

As a demonstration of what sharp technical skills and superb actors can achieve within the limitations of a cramped single setting,?Hallow Road?recalls Steven Knight’s similarly vehicle-bound?Locke, with Tom Hardy.

Aided by the moody synths and turbulent strings of Lorne Balfe and Peter Adams’ atmospheric score (which incorporates elements of Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel”), Anvari’s movie strikes a keen balance between psychological thriller and eerie folkloric horror.

?Its disturbing ambiguities take on whole new shadings after an unexpected reveal in the end credits.

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