Crew
Director – Babak Anvari, Screenplay – William Gillies, Producers – Richard Bolger, Nate Bolotin, Ian Henry, Aram Tertzakian & Lucan Toh, Photography – Kit Fraser, Music – Peter Adams & Lorne Balfe, Visual Effects – Egg VFX (Supervisor – Marc Buckley), Special Effects Supervisor – Andrew Carstairs, Production Design – Mark Kelly. Production Company – XYZ Films/LNDN./Two & Two Pictures/IPR.VC/Fis Eirann (Screen Ireland)/Hail Mary Pictures/Film Kolektiv/Great Point Media.
Cast
Rosamund Pike (Maddie Finch/Voice of the Kind Woman), Matthew Rhys (Frank Finch/Voice of the Husband), Megan McDonnell (Voice of Alice Finch), Tadhg Murphy (Voice of the Police Operator), Stephen Jones (Male Detective)
Plot
Frank and Maddie Finch are woken at 3am by a call from their daughter Alice. Alice had earlier fled the house after an argument with them over Alice having just found she was pregnant. She has had a crash on Hallow Road in Ashfolk Forest and is fearful because she has hit somebody. Frank and Maddie immediately start driving there to help her, while arguing about what to do. The fact that Alice was under the influence could ruin her future. Frank plans to say that it was him driving the car, while Maddie believes that Alice should accept responsibility. However, another couple arrive on the scene ahead of them and soon detect that something is wrong.
Babak Anvari is an Iranian-born filmmaker resident in the UK. He made his feature-length directorial debut with Under the Shadow (2016), a fascinating horror film set during Iran’s Cultural Revolution. Anvari subsequently went on to direct the likes of Wounds (2019) and I Came By (2022), as well as to produce the horror anthology series Monsterland (2020) and the horror films Treat (2021) and History of Evil (2024).
Hallow Road reminds a good deal of Locke (2014), which consisted of Tom Hardy in a car having a series of phone conversations as he drives. There Tom Hardy talking on a phone in a car was the whole of the film – and it managed to be surprisingly good too. Similarly here, almost the whole of the film, apart from a couple of scenes at the start and the end, take place in a car with Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys driving while talking on the phone. We see nothing of the daughter Alice other than a photo avatar that comes up when she calls on the phone. Hallow Road goes one further beyond Locke in that the man and woman whose voices are heard on the phone are also played by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, although this is never something you would have guessed until a read of the end credits.
Hallow Road comes with an impressively tight script from newcomer William Gillies. The script opens with an urgency right out of the starting gate with the phone call from Alice and rushes through a series of tense scenes as they drive where Rosamund Pike is trying to get Alice to perform compression on the injured girl and she and Matthew Rhys are arguing that it is a waste of time because the girl is dead.
There is an excellent performance from Rosamund Pike who gives great conviction to the moral arguments and scenes where she is coaching Alice to perform CPR by phone. The script is particularly good at drawing out the character undercurrents that emerge throughout the course of the journey, especially when it comes to Matthew Rhys’s willingness to sacrifice himself in Alice’s place and their arguing over whether they are coddling her or Alice should stand up and accept her choices.
There are great tensions and twists, especially when it comes the introduction of the two strangers and the way they pick apart the holes in the story that Rosamund and Matthew are trying to present. However, Hallow Road starts to fall apart when it comes to the fantastical denouement. [PLOT SPOILERS] This seems to indicate that Alice was the girl on the road and is the one who is dead and that the phone calls were ghostly ones from her. This leaves a lot of confusions. Such as how could Alice hit herself if she was the one driving? Or exactly who the other couple that found Alice were?
(Nominee for Best Actress (Rosamund Pike) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here