Set almost entirely during an urgent car ride, Babak Anvari’s “Hallow Road” begins as an intensely performed, deftly minimalist family thriller about two parents driving to the scene of their daughter’s accident while keeping her on the phone. That’s all you need to know going in, and all you should really learn beforehand, given how this race-against-the-clock premise unfolds, before swerving in completely unpredictable ways.
Few films have ever induced such immense tonal whiplash while exhibiting such tight formal control over their transformations. There’s a very clear boundary separating the kind of movie “Hallow Road” starts out as from what it eventually becomes, which all but cements its place as a fascinating artifact of this year’s midnight movie scene. Some might say it jumps the shark in order to achieve this distinction, but as Donald Glover’s character once naively noted on “Community,” “There was an episode of ‘Happy Days’ where a guy literally jumped over a shark, and it was the best one.” Sometimes, jumping the shark is awesome.
It also helps if your film is led by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, a pair of powerhouse performers who not only find a careful balance between heartbreak and fury, but are tasked with selling an entire story unfolding off-screen. Pike plays the depressed paramedic Maddie, while Rhys plays her problem-solving husband Frank, a middle-aged Welsh couple whose teenage daughter Alice (voiced by Megan McDonnell) has run away after a massive row.
Amid shots of car lights fluttering through the woods, Anvari lures us into the family’s life with shots of their home, including a freshly broken glass partially swept into a dustpan, as though we’ve been made privy to the scene of a crime. The fraught threads between Maddie, Frank and Alice are the emotional driving force, so these are the only details we really need to see. When a distraught Alice calls her parents in the middle of the night, revealing she hit a young girl with her car on an isolated forest trail, the movie tethers us to Maddie and Frank as they talk Alice through the situation over the phone, helping her keep the victim alive while trying to discern exactly what transpired.
These initial scenes — some of the only ones that occur outside the couple’s vehicle — are enveloped in a haze of 16mm film grain, giving “Hallow Road” the appearance of a warm-toned domestic drama. However, the moment they close their car door and begin driving Alice’s way, the palette and texture shift radically. A smooth, cold, digital façade takes hold, as though the inside of the vehicle, where we spend the following hour and change, were a world unto itself, protected from the outside. It’s a place where characters can confess their most intimate thoughts (and, if need be, concoct desperate, harebrained plans).
The film unfolds with livewire urgency as Maddie yells CPR instructions over the phone, and the two parents argue about how to get a fragile, traumatized Alice out of this situation, whether to involve the police and how to protect a future that now hangs in the balance. All the while, Anvari and cinematographer Kit Fraser ensure the camera is affixed to the car’s interior, capturing each exchange and emotional beat with visual clarity (they even delightfully exaggerate cellphone and dashboard lights for emphasis). The drive to Alice’s location is nearly an hour long, much of which unfolds in real time and across several phone calls — a structure sure to remind viewers of Steven Knight’s accomplished, claustrophobic drama “Locke,” up to a point. It turns out Anvari has something devious up his sleeve, dropping only minor, easy-to-miss hints along the way.
The movie’s pivot into genre territory is shockingly sudden, and yet, it works like a charm, thanks to the precise ways Anvari, Fraser and editor Laura Jennings twist the screws. The once-static camera comes unglued, as “Hallow Road” takes inexplicable, hilariously jaw-dropping turns befitting of a dark fairytale. All the while, the film maintains its unwavering focus on the family’s relationships, as well as the stresses and anxieties they bring home (and into the car). It also questions how far Maddie and Frank are willing to go in order to rescue Alice from an increasingly sticky situation, when it turns out she may not be the only witness to the crime.
In the end, the one criticism that can be levied at “Hallow Road” — if only in retrospect — is that the confines of its vehicular setting, along with its reliance on audio to relay Alice’s story, prevent it from leaning full-tilt into its most imaginative elements. However, that it dips its toe into this territory at all is somewhat remarkable, given the simple straightforward form it initially takes. With its dramatic themes spread across two wildly different halves, it makes for a unique, propulsive thrill ride whose baffling existence is key to its enjoyment.
