Hal­low Road review – heav­i­ly sign­post­ed horror

Dread is a con­stant in this Babak Anvari direct­ed cham­ber piece most­ly set inside a car on a late night jour­ney. Hal­low Road is writ­ten by William Gillies and stars Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys as par­ents who are hur­ried­ly rush­ing to aid their daugh­ter Alice (the voice of Megan McDon­nell over the phone) who has been involved in a car acci­dent near­by. Play­ing out as part psy­cho­log­i­cal chiller and part super­nat­ur­al hor­ror, it nav­i­gates parental fears and fam­i­ly secrets in a sin­is­ter lim­i­nal space.

The open­ing scene presents the after­math of a fam­i­ly encounter in foren­sic detail. The loud tick­ing of a clock, a para­medic work-pass idly strewn in the hall­way, the inces­sant beep of a smoke alarm when the bat­tery has run low, and Rhys’ Frank passed out on his desk. Pike’s Mad­die answers a call from Alice who is in dis­tress. This is all shot on 16mm film. As soon as the cou­ple jump in their car for a night­mar­ish dri­ve to res­cue their daugh­ter the cam­era switch­es to digital.

The human dra­ma works excep­tion­al­ly well thanks to the tal­ent­ed trio of cast mem­bers, but the super­nat­ur­al ele­ments are so heav­i­ly sign­post­ed they dis­tract from the emo­tion­al weight of the per­son­al demons haunt­ing the cou­ple. Pike’s para­medic has grown dis­tant from her hus­band and is strug­gling at work, while Rhys is upset at Alice for her behav­iour involv­ing a boyfriend who he doesn’t approve of. Both of them want to do what is best for their daugh­ter but their dif­fer­ing moral respons­es to her sit­u­a­tion cre­ate an atmos­phere of unease.

Anvari’s nifty cam­er­a­work in the car reflects the couple’s state of mind. Tight angles, claus­tro­pho­bic close-ups and the switch­ing POVs work well to cre­ate twitchy, edge-of-your- seat view­ing. Tech­ni­cal­ly the edit­ing is a mar­vel and the sound design is turned up to eleven for bone-crunch­ing inten­si­ty. The screen­play too builds mys­tery sur­round­ing an argu­ment, which is eked out in a taut and cred­i­ble fash­ion. Pike and Rhys’s per­for­mances are set to pan­ic mode and it’s their fraught dynam­ic that dri­ves the nar­ra­tive for­ward. A resus­ci­ta­tion sequence in par­tic­u­lar draws out their des­per­a­tion in a nov­el way. There are some clever deci­sions tak­en in how the dual dilem­ma plays out but as soon as the film switch­es gears into a super­nat­ur­al fairy-tale, with the cou­ple lit­er­al­ly get­ting lost in the woods, it los­es potency.

The ellip­ti­cal approach of the screen­play is less dis­ori­en­tat­ing than some­thing like Nico­las Roeg’s Don’t Look Now which dealt in sim­i­lar the­mat­ic ter­ri­to­ry. The alle­go­ry is blind­ing­ly obvi­ous from the very begin­ning which scup­pers a reveal lat­er on down the road. For­mal­ly, the ini­tial set-up recalls Jere­my Lovering’s In Fear or Steven Knight’s Locke and it ends up explor­ing a com­pa­ra­ble break­down in com­mu­ni­ca­tion between a fam­i­ly. Gillies’s script asks com­pelling ques­tions about the lengths par­ents will go to in order to pro­tect their child but cement­ing togeth­er two gen­res is a dif­fi­cult task and it’s one that doesn’t entire­ly work due to the screenplay’s shaky foundation.

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