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Good campfire stories work because they plant a burning ember into the kindling of our everyday fears, taking advantage of those listening in the dark and the quiet. They’ve got rhythm too: build-up and scene-setting, ebbs and flows until the punchline haunts you well after you crawl into your tent. Telling its wooded tale not around flames, but around a dashboard, Babak Anvari’s car-set thriller Hallow Road gets its flow going quickly and doesn’t let up as it adds fuel to the anxieties already deep-set in any parent’s heart. It’s alternatingly tense and campy, but told by a pair of expert tellers, flashlights up under their chins.
Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys play harried parents who receive a terrible call in the middle of the night: their daughter (Megan McDonnell) has hit a girl with her car, in the heart of a pitch-black forest. Hallow Road stays with the parents as they rush to her aid, a bit like Locke by way of Stephen King: A contained creeper whose goofy horror is driven by raw parental terror. Staying on the line, muting the phone, keeping people talking, debating what to do—these are the micro-dramas that keep the blood pumping through the larger horror. Pike initially shoulders much of this burden; she’s a freaked-out mom, but she’s also a paramedic. She’s not just trying to reassure her kid, but trying to keep the victim alive. Walking her weeping child through chest compressions over the phone as she and her husband speed through the night, Pike’s insistent professionalism is a biting counterpoint to Rhys’ more assuaging approach.
The good cop, bad cop parenting routine—one that underscored plenty of The Americans’ family-spy drama, in which Rhys also blended heightened plots with familiar emotional conflicts—belies a more complicated relationship between the family members. Mom and dad have their different demeanors (that crack and shatter as their nerves fray), but their daughter also pleads to them in different ways. As the night wears on, the circumstances of the accident play into these dynamics cleverly, commenting upon a fix-it approach to parenting that could result in coddled kids without the wherewithal to handle themselves in the real world. On the other hand, would any amount of preparatory parenting make you better equipped to handle hitting someone with your car?
When Hallow Road is determined to hit these thematic points, it can drop some of screenwriter William Gillies’ taut elegance. It also veers offroad a bit when Anvari pursues his passion for blending fairy tales with the everyday, a devotion that sometimes goes further off the rails (Wounds) than others (I Came By) yet has never matched the balance struck by his excellent Under The Shadow. Hollow Road, though, is closer to that golden middle ground than any of his other films, commingling his hard genre turns with the practical things that keep us up at night.
But Hallow Road really thrives when at its most simple. Sticking with Pike and Rhys in a simple windshield shot, cutting only to other tight, static angles from inside the car, allows the pair to carry the film. A few pieces of effective visual bombast go big alongside them to shock our systems, but this only works because the trip up until that point has been so realistically nervewracking. A long night drive, an overreliance on crappy technology, an impotence that only increases your desperation to be able to do something—these are the meat and potatoes of this thriller. It might not linger that long in your memory after the coals cool, but while it’s in the middle of its narrative, it’s hard not to be in for the long haul.
Director: Babak Anvari
Writer: William Gillies
Starring: Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys
Release Date: March 7, 2025 (SXSW)
