More a dark fable than a traditional horror movie, Anvari uses the brutal high-concept of Hallow Road’s setup and its structure—most of the film’s 80 minutes exist entirely within Maddie and Frank’s electric vehicle—to immerse the viewer and characters into water that’s pitched at a boiling roar before we even have our bearings. He then turns the heat up. As a consequence, Hallow Road becomes an exercise in descent. The first plunge comes from that phone call, but the further Maddie and Frank get down the road, the stranger and more unsettling the tension becomes as the story increasingly creeps toward the vaguely supernatural.
Anvari has teased that the movie and William Gillies’ screenplay is in part inspired by Celtic folklore, which is not to say the film takes on the full accouterments of a ghost story. Yet like Steven Knight and Tom Hardy’s Locke before it, Anvari utilizes the film’s confined space within a moving vehicle to careen a story toward the evermore surreal. In the case of Hallow Road that growing sense of incorporeal detachment from the life you left behind takes on a certain fairytale quality as grim as their roots in medieval folklore, and as unforgiving as an Old Testament deity. This is a passion play about how we raise our children. Or how we fail to.
The constantly in-motion camera thus uses the tight spaces in a worried parent’s car to trace every line and fidget on Pike and Rhys’ faces until their very countenances become haunted things. Pike particularly gives a tour de force in subtlety as she expresses bottomless terror with a single eye in extreme closeup while listening to a strange couple on her daughter’s phone pull up to the side of the road and ask Alice if she needs help.
Prudently, Alice’s side of the conversation is never shown until the bitter end. Instead she exists as a frozen smile on a smartphone screen, a jejune child caught in adolescence in her parents’ eyes despite her very real adult problems, which we hear being sobbed and screamed through the screen with a motionless grin. By the end of the film, that blue-lit screen looms across the film’s own frame as large as the gates to perdition.
The cumulative effect is a film that grabs hold of the viewer’s stomach and refuses to let go. As sleek and ruthlessly shaped as a katana, Hallow Road is swift, visceral, and leaves the audience gutted by the time we’ve been lured into the wilderness off the side of the road. It stays with you the next morning too.
Hallow Road premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival on March 7. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
