What do you get when you lock a young criminal in a luxury sports utility vehicle that is booby trapped to punish its intruder, thanks to some twisted, sadistic planning by its wealthy, vengeful owner? Well, if those two characters are played by Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, and the film is directed by David Yarovesky, you get a wild, claustrophobic ride with chaotic camera movement, jump scares and danger that escalates with every scene. All within the confines of an SUV.
When Yarovesky was given the script for “Locked,” which opened in theaters on March 21, he was immediately attracted to the story and how the stakes for the characters continually elevate. On top of that, the tight quarters in which the action takes place was a creative — and technical — challenge he couldn’t resist. “I really hadn’t made a movie like this before,” Yarovesky says. “It felt like a space that could really use something that felt organic and just really tense.”
“Really tense” puts it mildly. The minute Skarsgård’s Eddie shuts the vehicle’s door and then can’t open it, his world starts to spin… and the audience immediately feels trapped along with him. As the film progresses and the soundproof, indestructible walls of the vehicle close in tighter, the look and feel of the film intensifies and continues to build as Hopkins’ William becomes increasingly psychotic, using the programmed vehicle to, basically, torture its captive. With only two main characters — one of whom is mostly heard and not seen — and one very small setting in which to tell the story, Yarovesky’s task was not an easy one.
Anthony Hopkins’ William tells Eddie, “I want to introduce you to a little taste of hell.” And he does.
As William begins to communicate with Billy through the vehicle’s computer system and his insanity becomes abundantly clear, a power struggle plays out inside the car, which is reflected in the cinematography.
“Making this movie was insanely hard,” Yarovesky laughs. “I shot it in 19 days, and our hands were tied in so many ways. It’s an indie movie, so I didn’t have a big studio to throw money at stuff, and that presented a whole bunch of challenges. And then again, one of the other tropes of this space of specifically contained thrillers — like movies where someone’s trapped in a small space — is often that small space becomes constricting and prevents you from being able to shoot it in a cinematic way. But where there’s a will, there’s a way… and with the aid of DP Michael Dallatorre and Dan Sasaki at Panavision, magic was made.”
“Dan built us lenses custom for this,” Yarovesky explains. “Anamorphic lenses can’t focus anywhere near close enough to put it in a car with someone else, so he built us the widest anamorphic lens they had in their inventory and then brute forced other lenses for us to make them so that the minimum focus distance was inches.” While shooting “Dunkirk” for Christopher Nolan, Sasaki had an idea of a lens with an elbow joint, but never got to build it — until “Locked.”
David Yarovesky directs Anthony Hopkins in “Locked.”
“Locked” production designer Grant Armstrong worked under similar constraints for the 2014 sci-fi “Gravity” in which they shot in really tight, pod-like spaces. “In order to do that [on ‘Gravity’], they built it on a platform and in pieces on rails, so it was very easy — with one arm, you could just slide a quarter of the set away and slide it right back. And so we started talking about doing that with the interior set so that we could do anything, go anywhere; we could be completely free.”
On the surface, “Locked” looks like a vigilante film. You know, actions have consequences and crime doesn’t pay. But is there a political statement here about law and order? Yarovesky says it goes deeper — much deeper — than that.
“Politics have infected every aspect of our life these days. It’s almost impossible in 2025 to write a character and not know their political stance and their beliefs on a couple things, which is an unfortunate statement about where we are,” he says. “But this isn’t a political movie. And so, as a filmmaker, I tried to the best of my ability not to weigh on that scale. I allowed two people to really argue it out and make points and one-up each other. I didn’t want to put a finger on that scale because the story I’m telling you is a moral tale.”