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 glistening dark-brown meat stew; there is food 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 that she recently resigned her paramedic job and why, at some length: she assumed, with fatal results, that a patient with a pulmonary embolism was only 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 at first, well-meaning until she shifts into something more menacing and accusatory. 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 believe it’s Alice – there follows another disagreement, which 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 kind-of supernatural. 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 film’s 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
