Words by JANE CROWTHER
Student Alice is used to being picked up and brushed off by her parents whenever she stumbles. Though we never see her, we hear and know about her via her parents; over-protective Frank (Matthew Rhys) and his exasperated paramedic wife Maddie (Rosamund Pike). Early in the small hours, Alice calls her sleep-deprived mum in a panic – she has taken her dad’s car and driven to the titular road in a nearby forest where she’s accidentally knocked over a pedestrian. The parents jump into Maddie’s car to reach her, their SatNav informing them of the distance to reach their daughter while an increasingly upset Alice keeps them abreast over the speakerphone of the terrible, fatal mess she’s got herself into.
Essentially a real-time bottle episode in the vein of Locke, Hallow Road then unfurls, one mile and minute at a time, in the car as the couple struggle to help their child remotely, question their parenting and reveal the fractured family dynamic that preceded Alice storming out of the house earlier. And as the country roads become more labyrinthine and dark, a folk horror aspect begins to hover over proceedings as both parents’ psychological secrets come to the fore.
Hallow Road starts with a warning – a battery depleted smoke alarm chirruping – and grows in tension and disquiet as Rhys and Pike master myriad emotions while the green dashboard light casts a queasy hue over their distraught faces. To give more detail would be to spoil, but if you’re familiar with director Babak Anvari’s previous work in Under The Shadow, the fact that the crisis at the start of this thriller morphs to something more primal and primordial at its close should come as no surprise. Like the fraught relationship between parents and daughter (voiced by Megan McDonnell), there is something else going on in the trees – what exactly is open to interpretation by each viewer. And, based on a post-credit sting, those interpretations will not necessarily align.
Playing like a lost episode of Inside No 9, this disorientating, brisk thriller is an easy way to spend 80 minutes this weekend while also opening conversations of guilt, grief, helicopter parenting and the inherent creepiness of deep, dark woods.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images © 2025 Universal Pictures
Hallow Road is in cinemas now
