Minimalist, two-hander, nearly single-location horror-thrillers that unfold in real time can — and should —take any number of formal and narrative liberties, but it’s crucial that they use them to take us all the way to the place they have in mind. The latest film by British-Iranian director Babak Anvari (“Under the Shadow”) only gets us halfway before it gets lost in a fog of its own elevated ideas.
The story of two out-of-sync parents flying down a nighttime motorway to save their daughter after she’s crashed into a girl while driving through an eerie forest, “Hallow Road” makes for a highly tense watch that will have audiences flocking to the nearest dive bar or social media platform to map out easter eggs and froth over grand semiotics. Unfortunately, the film never transcends its tone of ever-present and palpable danger to become a more satisfying character piece.
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A degree of remove is rooted in the film’s very conceit and execution. It begins with Anvari and DP Kit Fraser’s choice to pointedly switch from 16mm film to digital early on. “Hallow Road” opens with luscious shots through a nether forest of spirit whispers, and then a pan to a girl’s shoe abandoned in the moss. The aftermath of a folkloristic horror? From there, still on celluloid, we cut inside a warmly lit, middle class home, as the camera consciously swoops through clues: an unfinished meal, half-consumed glasses of wine, carved pumpkins (ah, it’s Halloween), and crushed glass swept to the corner. Drama!
Maddie (Rosamund Pike), asleep in the bedroom, and Frank (Matthew Rhys), passed out on the desk of his home office, are awoken by a frantic call from their teenage daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), whom we know the whole movie only by her voice on the phone and a sweet-enough profile pic. We piece together that Maddie and Frank had an argument with Alice, after which she fled with his car and is now panicking after the bizarre accident. They rush to her aid, and as soon as Frank enters the address on Pike’s car’s GPS—“Hallow Road”— the frame, like heartless clockwork, rivets to digital.
The next hour takes place entirely inside the car, with Rhys and Pike swinging between barked orders, painful pleas, petrified silences, and some truly bone-crunching SFX. Trapped alongside these two fine actors, we become more acquainted with Maddie and Frank as characters. Maddie is a paramedic, and thus a detector. She detects pulses, kids under the influence, and the accuracy of the timing of chest pumps, which she commands poor, high Alice to perform on the girl she ran over in the woods.
But despite being the more rational and righteous of the parents, Maddie has a bad case of overestimating the relevance of her vocational training to the calamity at hand. That’s what Frank thinks, at least. He’s his wife’s opposite in every way: the emotional, sacrificial parent, a temperament which fits like a bad suit on his bland persona as a marketing director. It’s a sartorial misstep that Rhys wears as best he can, the actor’s performance a thousand miles removed from his charming, oxidized take on Perry Mason.
Things only become less intriguing as the night wears on, as loose plot threads mix with predictable secrets that these characters have been holding onto since long before the film began. For screenwriter William Gillies, the allure of immediacy appears to absolve the absence of history. Anvari is willing to work with that, as he leans into the uncertainty and dizzying suspension fueled by the film’s story.
On paper, Anvari’s slew of innovations should work. Little to no foley of the car, few to no anchoring shots of the road from inside the car, and a purposely simplistic GPS—suggesting tongue in cheek that the parents are in uncharted territory—conspire to keep us on edge. Fraser in turn distracts us by making the interior of the car a chamber piece of organic lighting (not complaining, with this cast), at least until the half way mark when the story careens into its alter-ego, transforming from thriller to horror. In this twilight zone, extreme closeups of Maddie and Frank’s terrified eyes, the sudden depiction of the road in soft focus, and the forest’s AI-like rendering are downright disorienting.
And yet, we do not feel as terrified for the characters as Anvari and Gillies estimate we will. A fundamental disconnect persists between the elevated treatment of the genre mix and the filmmakers’ ability to generate a grounded, genuine fear for Frank, Maddie, and especially Alice.
The upside of “Hallow Road’s” pure genre workout is that Anvari finds the sunny side up of this dreadfully nocturnal nowhere exurb. The downside is that he also denies us the pleasures of playing with folkloristic horror tropes. When a seeming Good Samaritan character shows up—like Alice, heard only through the phone— our hackles are instantly raised — how can a voice so saccharine conjure so much fright? Before we can really chew on her references to the piper or project other grim fairy tales onto Alice’s fate, Gillies and Anvari take the ride into fifth gear, a meta mode, with characters spouting lines such as “I want a better story,” “I asked all the wrong questions,” and “Am I making you uncomfortable?” Then, in the end credits, the filmmakers wholly exit the simulacrum with a doozy of a reveal.
The trouble is that it’s really hard to be both modernist and postmodernist in equal measure, and it feels disingenuous to have events refer to real emotions when you are also so quick to flout the veil. Doing so undoes the intentionality behind Anvari’s choices and leaves the cinematic text too open-ended. I felt trapped for too long in the movie’s uncanny valleys, my mind accelerating to the formal and narrative virtues of other, more successful films that overlap with this one: Coralineand the concrete symbolism of the Other Mother; the focused existential crisis of Locke‘s protagonist; and even the more earnest attempt of another SXSW endless road film, “It Ends” to reinvent the genre wheels. If only this one didn’t feel as vacant long after it’s arrived at its destination.
Grade: C+
“Hallow Road” premiered at SXSW 2025. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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