Old Yorker

  • Hallow Road

    Babak Anvari (2025)

    The one enjoyable moment arrived as the audience – all six of us – were leaving the Red Screen at Curzon Wimbledon, when another elderly man said, half to himself and half to me, ‘That was a laugh a minute’.  There are only eighty minutes in the psychological thriller Hallow Road but they pass slowly.  For the first few of them, Babak Anvari’s camera prowls around a kitchen table, set for three people, where an evening meal appears to have come to an abrupt, premature end.  One plate hasn’t yet received a helping of the glistening dark-brown meat stew seen on the other two plates and on the floor, along with broken glass.  It’s the middle of the night and the camera now moves to a bedroom, where a sleeping woman is woken by the sound of regular bleeping.  She gets up, realises the smoke alarm batteries are on the blink, and changes them.  This realistic detail and the woman’s prompt efficiency make the uncleared kitchen table mess even more striking – and unlikely.  I think I started to lose trust in the film from this point on.

    The woman, Maddie, picks up a call on her mobile from her daughter, Alice, evidently the cause of the argument that interrupted the family supper.  Alice stormed out and drove off, in her father Frank’s car.  He now appears, having been sleeping at a desk, anxious to know where Alice is.  Frank’s even more anxious when there’s soon another call from a suddenly distraught Alice, who says she’s knocked a girl down in the road – Hallow Road, which runs alongside a forest where the family, we’re told repeatedly, used to spend happy days together.  Eighteen-year-old Alice fears that the girl she hit, and who she says is about her age, is dead.  Frank and Maddie hurriedly get into Maddie’s car and set off for Hallow Road, with Frank driving.  Most of the rest of the film takes place inside this car, with only occasional shots of the dark roads along which it’s travelling.  Hallow Road is virtually a two-hander for Rosamund Pike as Maddie and Matthew Rhys as Frank – or, rather, a piece for three voices.  The third belongs to Megan McDonnell, as Alice, with whom her parents are in frantic phone contact for much of their journey.

    Alice, who’s at university, sparked the supper-time bust-up with the news that she’s pregnant by her boyfriend Jakob; during the car phone exchanges, she also reveals she has been high on E for the last few hours.  Her father is much less ready than her mother to find fault with their daughter – in fact, Frank wants to take the blame for Alice’s accident, though Maddie disagrees with this.  A paramedic, she gives Alice clear instructions over the phone on how to give her road victim CPR.  I missed any mention of Frank’s work though he tells Alice at one point how he envies the university education she’s getting – as if that would have been a pipe dream for someone of Frank’s generation (he must have been normal student age in the mid-1990s …).  Given that the film is nearly all talk, William Gillies’ screenplay doesn’t tell us a lot.  In one of Hallow Road‘s oddest bits, Maddie suddenly confesses, at some length, that and why she recently resigned her paramedic job:  she assumed, with fatal results, that a patient with a pulmonary embolism was having a panic attack.  Frank barely reacts to this news.  It’s not implied that this is because he’s preoccupied with the Alice situation; he reaches across his free hand to touch Maddie reassuringly.  At least this temporarily pauses their nearly constant arguments en route.

    Frank’s decision to take the rap for Alice is thwarted when someone else arrives on the scene before they do:  they hear the voice of a woman – well-spoken and, it seems, well-meaning until she turns accusatory and menacing.  She says that the girl hit by Alice is alive and being attended to by the woman’s husband.  When Maddie and Frank finally reach their destination, there’s no sign of their daughter in Frank’s car.  Frank approaches an apparently dead body lying in undergrowth and yells in horror:  it’s Alice.  Maddie investigates and refuses to accept it’s Alice – there follows another disagreement that would seem entirely crazy were it not that Alice had said that her botched attempts at CPR were causing the girl’s face to change.  It’s Maddie who’s seemingly vindicated when she calls Alice’s phone and Alice picks up.  She says she’s been kidnapped by the mystery woman and her husband; Frank and Maddie then hear the woman telling Alice she now has new parents, who will correct her behaviour and, in due course, that of her unborn child.  Next morning, Maddie, draped in a shiny foil blanket, and Frank, smoking a cigarette, are sitting in an ambulance.  Two police officers discuss what has actually happened.  The officers reckon Alice was killed the previous night by a car on the dark road where she was walking, and that her parents’ insistence that they spoke to her at length on the phone was a kind of shared trauma response.

    Babek Anvari’s Under the Shadow (2016), set in his native Iran, was an impressive debut feature.  I’ve not seen Anvari’s two intervening films, Wounds (2019) and I Came By (2022), but Hallow Road is very disappointing.  The British Board of Film Classification has given it a 15 certificate, warning of ‘strong language, threat, horror’ and going on to describe the film as a ‘horror thriller’.  There’s ominous music (by Lorne Balfe and Peter Adams), daylight arrives only in the brief closing sequence and the story turns out to be a fantasy of sorts.  But this is ‘horror’ cinema only in the sense that it tries to dramatise every-parent’s-worst-nightmare – that there comes a point at which a mother and/or father can no longer protect their child.

    Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys are an interesting pairing.  I went to Hallow Road thinking of them both as good actors who’ve not really shone in lead roles in cinema – a view that hasn’t changed as a result of this picture.  I’ve admired Pike in supporting film parts in, for example, An Education (2009), Made in Dagenham (2010) and, much as I hated the film as a whole, Saltburn (2023); but she wasn’t up to her supposedly meatier role in Gone Girl (2014).  Rhys, who had a pretty thankless task in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), has been excellent in television mini-series like Death Comes to Pemberley (2013) and, earlier this year, Towards Zero.  The latter was the latest of those plush but crap ‘modernisations’ of Agatha Christie.  Plenty of the acting was gruesome; Rhys, as the depressed police inspector, was an honourable exception (along with Anjelica Huston, Jackie Clune and Grace Doherty).  He got more emotional depth and truth into his few minutes on screen with Grace Doherty than he does in over an hour’s monotonously intense playing in Hallow Road.  Rosamund Pike is relatively nuanced in the couple’s shouting matches but she overdoes things in her second role, revealed only in the closing credits but plain to hear well before then.  Pike also voices her main character’s nemesis – the bossy-sinister woman who takes Alice in charge.

    22 May 2025

  • Blackmailed

    Marc Allégret (1951)

    I felt I ought to see something in BFI’s Mai Zetterling season – which includes her work as a director and as an actor – but Blackmailed was an unfortunate choice.  This British thriller, directed by a Frenchman, doesn’t do justice to Zetterling or anyone else involved.  I plumped for Blackmailed because the various contributors added up to a promising list.   As well as Zetterling, the cast includes Dirk Bogarde, Fay Compton and Michael Gough.   Roger Vadim, in his early twenties and assistant to director Marc Allégret at the time, shares the screenplay credit – with Hugh Mills, who had co-written the previous year’s So Long at the Fair, in which Bogarde also appears and which I’d recently enjoyed on television.  James Robertson Justice, who plays the blackmailer in Allégret’s film, is an actor I don’t like but I knew from an online thumbnail plot description that the blackmailer got killed at an early stage, so this piece of casting seemed almost a bonus.  Allégret’s direction lacks rhythm, though (as far as I can tell from IMDb, he didn’t direct another film in English subsequently) – and John Wooldridge’s wobbly score hardly helps.  Blackmailed is an odd creature – a listless melodrama.  Its moral scheme is more noteworthy than any of the story’s supposedly intriguing elements.

    The source material is a 1946 novel by Elizabeth Myers, Mrs Christopher.  The title character is an almoner in a London hospital.  (The hospital in Blackmailed looks to be a pre-NHS outfit, which chimes with the novel’s original publication date.)  The film’s opening scenes give the impression that, although she’s not a medic, the place would fall apart without deeply conscientious Mrs Christopher (Fay Compton).  When her brother Hugh Sainsbury (Harold Huth), who edits a local newspaper, arrives one evening to take her to the theatre, his sister says she’s too busy to join him.  She goes instead on an errand, on behalf of Mary (Shirley Wright), a young patient admitted to the hospital earlier in the day after a traffic accident.  Mary is distressed and anxious for an envelope containing money to be delivered by hand.  Mrs Christopher makes her way to the home of the intended recipient, Mr Sine (James Robertson Justice), where she interrupts a dispute between him and a young woman (Mai Zetterling) about another payment apparently due to Sine.  Mrs Christopher is instantly suspicious of what he’s up to – even more suspicious of the handgun she sees in Sine’s hand.  While he’s in heated discussion with the two women, a young man (Dirk Bogarde) also turns up.  Realising that the man of the house is a blackmailer, Mrs Christopher threatens to contact the police.  A struggle ensues, a gunshot is heard and Sine falls dead.  Mrs Christopher pulled the trigger.

    Much of the rest of the film (which runs only eighty-five minutes) describes the predicaments of Zetterling’s Carol Edwards, tyrannised by her hypochondriac husband Maurice (Michael Gough) and in love with GP Giles Freeman (Robert Flemyng), and Bogarde’s Stephen Munday, a would-be painter but, more to the point, a military deserter, who’s trying desperately to get abroad with Alma (Joan Rice), his girlfriend and artist’s model.  These characters are linked not just by Sine’s exploitation of them but also through Hugh Sainsbury’s paper’s offer of a reward for information on the identity of the blackmailer’s killer:  first Maurice Edwards then Stephen Munday tries to get his hands on the reward.  The latter succeeds, after delivering to Sainsbury the startling news that his sister is the guilty party, at which point the reward has turned into hush money.

    A police detective arrives on cue at Sainsbury’s office and Stephen Munday makes a run for it.  A moderately exciting rooftop chase sequence, which doesn’t end well for Stephen, leads into the film’s closing scene, where the Scotland Yard man says he has a few questions for Mrs Christopher.  She calmly replies there’s no need for questions and admits responsibility for Sine’s death, informing the detective and her brother that ‘Our lives belong to God’.  This moral heroine of the story, who dominates the first part of Blackmailed, is conspicuous by her absence from most of the intervening action, returning only at the last minute to do the decent thing.  Mrs Christopher obviously must be kept out of the picture to let the plot take its course.  The trouble is, she’s so evidently righteous from the word go that you don’t believe she’d hesitate to tell the police immediately what happened.  And though Sine is its only outright villain, and the film has some sympathy for the blackmailees, it can’t, according to the moral codes of the time, let them off the hook.  A wife loved by a man she’s not married to, is duty bound to return to the husband who treats her abominably.  A deserter can’t be allowed to escape.

    To be fair to the cast, they treat their variously compromised characters sensitively.  Fay Compton’s Mrs Christopher comes over as solemnly sincere rather than sanctimonious.  Michael Gough makes the malingering ratbag Maurice vividly individual.  And Dirk Bogarde does interesting things, of course – it’s striking that he’s more physically than vocally expressive here.   Mai Zetterling, limited as her role is, is good enough to confirm my regret at choosing this film rather than one of the other offerings in BFI’s tribute to her.

    14 May 2025

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