SXSW Review: ‘Hallow Road’ is a Stark, Gripping, Claustrophobic Two-Hander with Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare to get a call that their child is in trouble. Not being able to be physically there to help can be extremely devastating, and those who are truly looking out for the wellbeing of their children will refrain from scolding bad decisions and simply offer support in a moment of crisis. Hallow Road takes that premise to the extreme, following two parents within the space of a car as they drive a lengthy distance in the middle of the night to locate and assist their daughter after she calls them to say that she’s hit someone on the road.

Maddie (Rosamund Pike) can’t sleep because the battery in the smoke detector keeps beeping, but Frank (Matthew Rhys) is out cold. They’re both jarred awake when Maddie receives a phone call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell) in a panic. They quickly get into Maddie’s car – Alice was driving Frank’s – and begin the forty-five-minute journey on dark roads to her location. Maddie, a paramedic, isn’t sure why Alice isn’t still on the phone with the police, but she talks her daughter through performing CPR on a victim who it seems can’t be resuscitated. Their conversation veers from reassuring Alice that everything is going to be okay to interrogating her mental state back to comforting her as new factors emerge that make these parents even more worried about the fate of their daughter and whether they can get to her before anything truly irreversible happens.

This film comes from director Babak Anvari, best known for Under the Shadow and Wounds, and screenwriter William Gillies. While it’s not entirely a one-setting film, it does spend most of its time within the space of the car with Alice only heard on the phone and not seen. Audiences really get to experience what it’s like for these parents to be powerless to do anything other than hope the connection lasts and that they’ll be able to get there before her battery dies and they have no way to reach her. That includes several key cinematography choices to expand the space of the car with the camera and to highlight a jarring and horrifying realization that recontextualizes everything.

There’s tension building in this film from the moment the phone rings. Maddie keeps it together and tries to assess the situation while Frank frantically shouts at her to put it on speaker phone so he can hear what’s happening too. Throughout it all, she maintains a comparatively poised and collected demeanor while Frank frequently gets agitated and visibly expresses worry. Audiences learn just as much about the way the two of them interact – like Frank lambasting Maddie for not getting her car serviced and seeming surprised that she’s started smoking again – as they do about their strained relationship with their daughter, which has contributed to her ending up in this very situation because she needed some space.

This film will be heightened as an unsettling experience for those who do have children and would never want to imagine this kind of scenario, and there’s no relief from the tension either since they have to keep driving in order to have any hope of getting to Alice to do anything to help her. Pike and Rhys perform admirably, in frame and on call for the entirety of the film, forced to work with the space around them to make this nightmare of a car ride believable. The chilling nature of this film, which does include some brief moments of nervous laughter, lasts right up until its deliberately ambiguous end, meant to leave audiences with contradictory concepts to ponder about what it means to do the right thing and to truly take responsibility.

Movie Rating: 8/10