Hallow Road (2025)

On a dark night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), with whom they had a giant row that evening. Apparently, Alice stormed off and stole Frank’s car when the parental units got rather angry at her for certain life decisions that don’t bode terribly well for the future they imagined for her.

Anger notwithstanding, Alice is now calling them for help. She has had an accident, struck a girl with her car on a lonely forest road, and doesn’t know what to do. Because the circumstances look dubious, and will become increasingly so the more information Alice shares, Maddie and Frank are driving to help Alice. Maddie’s experience as a emergency rescuer comes in helpful for talking Alice through first aid steps on the girl she injured, at least.

However while the parents are driving on, developments take a rather dark turn or two.

Speaking of the drive, there’s something strange going on there as well, for Hallow Road, where Alice had her accident, seems curiously difficult to reach, as if there were forces at work that have their own ideas about what to do about Alice for the trouble she has gotten herself into, forces rather less willing to tolerate wrongdoing than parents may be.

Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a project that could very well have ended up as merely a gimmick movie of a kind that might have been better realized as an audio play. However, Anvari directs the hell out of a story that consists of two people in a car having a phone call for most of its running time. There’s an admirable sense of focus to Anvari’s work here, as well as clear trust in his main actors to convey desperation, anger, as well as slowly encroaching dread. Which, as actors of a certain calibre are wont to do in cases like this, they repay with the kind of great work that eschews getting too showy while also hitting the proper dramatic notes, suggesting things that don’t need to be told directly.

William Gillies’s script works like clockwork but never feels like one, and handles characterisation as well as it does escalation, while confronting its increasingly fraying characters with a situation where one wrong decision cascades until events become catastrophic. I also loved how the film handles the supernatural, mixing very traditional folkloric tropes in a way that makes them fit perfectly with its psychological thriller base.

To my eyes, Hallow Road is a prime example of how to make creative use of constraints, and how to make a movie out of very basic elements that’s anything but basic.