Hallow Road: 'a lean, mean, tension-filled ride'

To keep a movie interesting, while shooting in a confined space for a lengthy period, is quite a challenge, said Amon Warmann in Empire – but Babak Anvari has pulled it off here. For the 80-minute run time of Hallow Road, his camera is focused mainly on two people in a car – and "it makes for a lean, mean, tension-filled ride".

Late at night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a frantic phone call from their 18-year-old daughter Alice; having driven off in a rage following a family row, she has accidentally hit a pedestrian on a dark forest road – "and she has no idea what to do next". The parents jump in their own car and, as they race off to find her, they discuss "what the future looks like" for Alice and them, and how they might get out of it. Meanwhile, the audience is drip-fed revelations about the tensions that led them to this point.

Most of the action occurs off-screen, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. We never see Alice, and it's unclear whether she's even telling the truth about what has happened. Owing to the constraints of the set-up, the tension has to be relayed via speakerphone interactions, but the script is too obvious for any to build: the only thing that really escalates is how silly it all is.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Part psychological thriller, part supernatural horror, the film benefits from fine performances, said Katherine McLaughlin in Little White Lies. The couple's fraught dynamic drives the narrative forward; and the camerawork – all tight angles and switching POVs – reflects their state of mind. But when they get lost in the wood, and we enter creepy fairy-tale territory, the film loses potency, and the "allegory is blindingly obvious from the very beginning, which scuppers" the twist later on.