Hallow Road Review: Rosamund Pike Stars in Perfect Nightmare

The worst nightmares are the ones you can believe in. They feature the people you love in your life—and sometimes the people you fear. And no matter how weird or unforgiving they become, the reason they linger into your waking life is because you recognize the truth beneath the unreality.

Nine years after a similarly merciless feature debut, Under the Shadow, director Babak Anvari has again crafted exactly such a torment in Hallow Road, a relentless 80-minute nerve-gnasher that sets out from a parent’s worst fear before driving toward a destination far stranger and crueler than its already-grim premise suggests. Which is saying something since the film opens with middle-aged parents Maddie and Frank (Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys) sleeping in separate rooms when the phone call comes. 

From the fact that Maddie is in their bedroom, and Frank is resting fitfully at a desk, we are immediately clued into the idea that something harrowing happened even before the film starts. Yet viewers are left to piece together the shards of a ruined family life because things are about to go rapidly from implicitly bad to explicitly worse. Their daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell) has apparently hit a stranger during the witching hour of night while driving alone in a Welsh forest about an hour from the family house. Now she wants Mom and Dad to come fix it for her.

It’s obviously the call every parent dreads, but how Pike and Rhys’ guardians each react to the bad news infers much about every choice they’ve made up to this point in Alice’s life. A somewhat beleaguered EMT, Maddie commands her daughter to call an ambulance at once and begins instructing her on how to deliver CPR. Frank, meanwhile, demands to know if anyone else has driven by and is already out the door and behind the wheel before they’ve gotten confirmation that the ambulance is coming. Like apparently in all other matters, Frank wants to protect his little girl, and Maddie recognizes that there is no escape from what is about to happen. Nonetheless, they drive on, down the Hallow Road into darkness and their final absolution.

More a dark fable than a traditional horror movie, Anvari uses the brutal high-concept of Hallow Road’s setup and its structure—most of the film’s 80 minutes exist entirely within Maddie and Frank’s electric vehicle—to immerse the viewer and characters into water that’s pitched at a boiling roar before we even have our bearings. He then turns the heat up. As a consequence, Hallow Road becomes an exercise in descent. The first plunge comes from that phone call, but the further Maddie and Frank get down the road, the stranger and more unsettling the tension becomes as the story increasingly creeps toward the vaguely supernatural.

Anvari has teased that the movie and William Gillies’ screenplay is in part inspired by Celtic folklore, which is not to say the film takes on the full accouterments of a ghost story. Yet like Steven Knight and Tom Hardy’s Locke before it, Anvari utilizes the film’s confined space within a moving vehicle to careen a story toward the evermore surreal. In the case of Hallow Road that growing sense of incorporeal detachment from the life you left behind takes on a certain fairytale quality as grim as their roots in medieval folklore, and as unforgiving as an Old Testament deity. This is a passion play about how we raise our children. Or how we fail to.

The constantly in-motion camera thus uses the tight spaces in a worried parent’s car to trace every line and fidget on Pike and Rhys’ faces until their very countenances become haunted things. Pike particularly gives a tour de force in subtlety as she expresses bottomless terror with a single eye in extreme closeup while listening to a strange couple on her daughter’s phone pull up to the side of the road and ask Alice if she needs help.

Prudently, Alice’s side of the conversation is never shown until the bitter end. Instead she exists as a frozen smile on a smartphone screen, a jejune child caught in adolescence in her parents’ eyes despite her very real adult problems, which we hear being sobbed and screamed through the screen with a motionless grin. By the end of the film, that blue-lit screen looms across the film’s own frame as large as the gates to perdition.

The cumulative effect is a film that grabs hold of the viewer’s stomach and refuses to let go. As sleek and ruthlessly shaped as a katana, Hallow Road is swift, visceral, and leaves the audience gutted by the time we’ve been lured into the wilderness off the side of the road. It stays with you the next morning too.

Hallow Road premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival on March 7. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.

The post Hallow Road Review: Rosamund Pike Stars in Perfect Nightmare appeared first on Den of Geek.