Hallow Road

Bluesky

An intense drama played out almost entirely within a car, Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road begins in a house, but whether we’re seeing it before or after the action is unclear. The table is still laid out with food. One glass is full of wine; elsewhere, there’s broken glass on the floor, though somebody appears to have swept most of it away. The camera drifts around the handsomely appointed space, telling us something about the lifestyle of the inhabitants, provoking curiosity as it takes in assorted details. A laminated card reads ‘Madeleine Finch, paramedic’. Beside it is a packet of citalopram. Then we cut away, abruptly, to a forest in the middle of the night, to confused shots through underbrush. Something has clearly gone very wrong.

Maddie (Rosamund Pike) is woken by a smoke alarm making that annoying little chirping sound that they do when they want new batteries. She finds her husband Frank (Matthew Rhys) asleep at his desk. It’s shortly after that that she gets the call. Their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell), is in trouble. Driving through Ashton Forest, she crashed into someone. A girl about her age, she say, who is just lying in the road. She doesn’t know what to do.

Frank’s first instinct is to protect his child. For Maddie, that’s complicated by years of training. As they get in their car and race to the scene, she instructs Alice on what needs to be done to give the girl a chance of surviving until the paramedics get there. Frank tries to stop her, fearing that it will add to the trauma. Maddie’s own experience assures her that inaction is the surest way to being crushed by guilt later. But if Frank doesn’t understand, is that partly her fault? During moments when the arguments precipitated by the crisis fade, we get the impression that there has been tension between the couple for a long time. They haven’t really been talking. Frank doesn’t know how troubled Maddie has become; and she has, perhaps, lost sight of how far he’s willing to go for his family.

This family tension extends to Alice. Before long we learn that there was a family argument, that she took Frank’s car and went off in a strop. It adds to the parents’ sense of guilt, but there are more uncomfortable associated issues. Have they been too aggressive with her? Have they indulged her too much, so that she doesn’t know how to accept responsibility for her own behaviour? A shocking development halfway through the film makes questions like these impossible to avoid. Simultaneously, the mundane, if chilling, premise becomes tangled up with troubling notions about the forest itself. What follows may draw heavily on the folkloric and supernatural, but it can be understood either literally or metaphorically, and whilst a little more restraint at the scripting stage would have gone a long way, it’s largely successful. Either way, it’s debatable whether any decisions the characters make now can save them, or whether they are in the hands of fate.

Pike is always impressive, and has plenty to work with here. She’s largely responsible for carrying the film, with her co-stars in more reactive roles. Screened as part of South by Southwest 2025, Hallow Road is an Irish co-production, and it shows both in theme and in quality. With Anvari treating the limited spaces of the car as a challenge rather than an impediment, and forcing us to keep looking at his stars no matter how uncomfortable it gets, the film may follow a familiar road, but it goes the distance.