Starring Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys

Directed by Babak Anvari

Universal – In Cinemas Now

When Maddie and Frank get a call from their troubled daughter in the middle of the night after she is involved in a road accident, it’s a race against time to get to the scene to help her.

The last time I heard someone say ‘I blame the parents’ it was at a tram stop in Manchester in reference to an act of wanton neighbourhood vandalism. I wasn’t convinced that it was a particularly illuminating comment then, and while it makes for an unusual premise for Babak Anvari’s psychological horror thriller, Hallow Road ultimately I wasn’t too convinced by it here either.

There are all sorts of interesting things going on in Hallow Road. The film’s boldest move is to restrict 99% of the action to the interior of Maddie and Frank’s car as they rush to the scene of Alice’s accident, reminiscent of Tom Hardy in Stephen Knight’s 2013 road thriller Locke. Well, I say ‘rush’, and I think I mentioned a ‘race against time’ earlier. Hmmm…

While the car-bound location is the movie’s strongest conceptual card, it is also its greatest flaw, not because what we’re left with is essentially an audio drama (albeit quite a good audio drama), but because the nuts and bolts of its execution are so poor. In Locke, Hardy was filmed inside a real BMW on a low-loader actually heading down the M6 Motorway as per his fictional journey. I never doubted for a moment he was where the movie wanted me to believe he was. Unfortunately, low-loaders are out of fashion these days, perhaps for reasons of cost, which means that Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys are in a studio somewhere in the Czech Republic in an entirely unconvincing green screen set up. I can’t remember seeing a less persuasive movie car interior since about 1965.

Considering it’s supposed to be a ‘race against time’, Rhys, at the wheel, seems to be driving at a steady 30 mph, never changing gear, and not bothering to steer at all. The location shots of the driver’s POV, racing down remote unlit country lanes in County Wicklow, don’t match the green screen backgrounds behind the interior shots, which have streetlights and houses passing at a noticeably slower speed. The engine is virtually silent and the journey is entirely smooth despite the bumpy little roads they’re supposed to be navigating. If this sounds like I’m being overly anal about a tiny detail (it has been known) I make no apologies. The whole movie hinges on the claustrophobia of these two anxious parents, stuck in a car together for the best part of 80 minutes. Given that Anvari has two excellent actors giving the movie their all, it’s a genuine shame to stage it in such an artificial and amateurish fashion. It is incredibly distracting. I couldn’t get past it. It dissipated any sense of urgency.

I was brought up to have an eye for detail so you can blame my parents…

…which brings me to the story. Alice is at the other end of the phone, but can we, or Maddie and Frank, trust what they’re hearing, especially when there’s something about fairies in the wood, and they hear a mysterious couple approach their distressed daughter? Once again I found myself struggling with the production values. While Pike and Rhys were trying to look traumatised in their green screen Land Rover, Alice sounded as if she was being given a tongue lashing by Linda Snell, the village busybody from The Archers, Radio 4’s long running rural soap opera.

There is a reason for this artificiality, we discover in the movie’s spooky twist, but by then it is too late. I was expecting the jaunty tones of Barwick Green, The Archers theme tune to strike up.

Anvari and screenwriter William Gillies are trying to say something interesting about the inner psychology of well-meaning parents who have unwittingly become the monsters in their own story, but aside from the distracting production issues, there are too many inconsistent sidebars for the ideas to really hit home, and the twist, when it comes is of the ‘Doh!’ variety rather than being the satisfying kick in the guts the movie promises.

Verdict: As a horror curiosity, Hallow Road is worth a look… or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it would be far more engaging just to listen to the dialogue, and do without the ropey visuals altogether. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com