Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys star as parents who receive a distressing late night call from their teenage daughter, who has just accidentally hit a pedestrian whilst driving through some woods. They jump in their car, racing to get there before anyone else stumbles across the scene. They talk to their daughter to keep her calm but then strange things start to happen.
I am glad I saw Hallow Road at a morning screening and emerged into daylight as I found it disconcertingly creepy. It runs for just 80 minutes and not a single one of those is wasted. It starts off as a white knuckle ride of a thriller as the couple race to the scene, trying to make sense of what happened, with tensions in their marriage bubbling below the surface.
The second half slowly strays into folk horror territory that is eerily effective. Credit has to go to William Gillies for his pared down screenplay, but even more so to director Babak Anvari. Although nearly all of the film is set in a car, just like Steven Knight’s even better Locke from 2014, he uses some really inventive visual flourishes to ramp up the tension. Rhys and especially Pike, in dual role, do great work too. Inventive and original, Hallow Road deserves a bigger audience than it will probably get.
Rating: 8 out of 10