It's every parent's worst nightmare. The phone rings in the middle of the night, and it's your child sobbing, calling for your help, and time is running out. What would you do to save them?
This is the beginning of Hallow Road, the latest thriller from Babak Anvari, director of the critically acclaimed psychological drama Under the Shadow. A call in the night spurs a pair of parents to race out to find their daughter, who's calling them from the scene of car crash. But set mostly in the car on the way to the collision, this on-the-road tale plumbs deeper than the everyday fears parents experience, into something remarkably more disturbing. Written by William Gillies, Hallow Road offers a claustrophobic setting where fear comes from the unknown of what's going on at the other end of the phone line.
The film's lean premise is certainly enough to intrigue. But the gripping performances of Pike and Rhys, combined with Anvari's ruthlessly riveting direction, will have you gasping for air.
Hallow Road is a story of parents desperate to save their child.
Somewhere in England, stoic mother Maddie (Rosamund Pike) gets a frantic phone call from her 18-year-old daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell). Tearfully, the college student tells her mother that she's been in a car collision, and she's about 40 minutes away on a heavily forested stretch known as Hallow Road. And while she's okay, someone is lying in the road, unmoving.
Maddie, who is a paramedic, calmly begins by asking clarifying questions of her daughter, like if she's called emergency services for help. Meanwhile, Frank — instantly anxious — insists they rush to the scene. In real time, the couple will clamor into the car, tensions already high. As they comfort Alice over the phone, allusions are made to a fight earlier in the evening, something that caused the girl to run off into the night in distress. But there's also a growing conflict between the mother and father, as one wishes to confront the potentially catastrophic truth of this road incident and the other is desperate to coddle their scared child.
Incredibly, Hallow Road is shot mostly within the sports utility vehicle the parents drive to the titular scene. Showing remarkable restraint, Gillies' screenplay never urges Anvari to cut to Alice or what she can see from inside her vehicle. Instead, all we see of her during her parents' mad dash is a profile photo beaming up from the caller ID on Maddie's phone. Though it's a chipper photo of a young woman smiling in a colorful knit cap, it's unnerving because of the sharp contrast of her voice, unhinged and weepy on the other end of the line. Other sounds will creep into the call as well, bringing a spine-tingling uncertainty to what exactly is going down on Hallow Road.
Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys are jaw-droppingly intense in Hallow Road.
This setup of racing to a crash might seem a bit thin for an 80-minute movie, but Hallow Road is pulse-poundingly alive because of the brewing fight between Maddie and Frank. While he's desperate to protect Alice from any negative fallout from this collision, Maddie fears facing the consequences are the only way forward. She cryptically suggests you can't run from what you've done, even if you get away with it. But the full meaning of this will take time to unfold. And in that time, each passing minute throbs with this couple's mounting fear, resentment, and guilt.
Rhys is a raw nerve, bellowing to be in control in a situation far beyond him. Pike, who played the terrifying anti-heroine of Gone Girl and the blithely cruel matriarch of Saltburn, begins weary yet resolute. But as the story races along, each will offer a surprising and fascinating performance that demands to be seen again, in part because of the terrifying secrets they reveal.
Because the premise of this movie pits its stars against a increasingly menacing phone call, Hallow Road will undoubtedly draw comparisons to movies like the emergency services dispatch thriller The Guilty (either its Danish original or the Jake Gyllenhaal-fronted U.S. remake) or Tom Hardy's car-centric drama Locke. But Hallow Road abruptly veers off from these grounded dramas when someone else shows up on Alice's side of the call. Is it a good Samaritan who just happened to be on a long, dark, remote road at 3 a.m. in the morning? Or does this family have a whole new thing to worry about? Trapped in the car with Maddie and Frank, we, the audience, are in their unenviable shoes. And it's wickedly exhilarating.
Don't look for spoilers on Hallow Road.
Surely, it's tempting. Out of its World Premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival, Hallow Road was swiftly gaining buzz among attendees and critics. Personally, I'm glad that colleagues said only that I should see it without going into details. I knew the basic premise. But the gnarly turns in Gillies' script came as a true surprise, giving this critic a rare rush of actually being caught off guard.
I've been careful not to reveal where Hallow Road goes to protect its deliciously devilish secrets. But I can tell you without spoilers that Anvari's direction is masterful. Though confined to the car, the cinematography of Kit Fraser brings energy through whip pans between parents, and a very tight close-up hovering over a wide-eyed stare of horror, as they can see only the road ahead of them but can hear something strange on the other end of the line. Pike and Rhys lean into this claustrophobic energy, guzzling up all the air in the car with their combativeness, resentments, and agony. And the soundscape of Alice's tinny voice over the phone colliding with curious sounds in the forest around her are so genuinely frightening that I full-on screamed. Twice.
In the end, Hallow Road is a sensationally scary thriller not only for the surprises it packs but also for the metaphor it makes about parenting. Trapped with a mother and father in a battle for their child's future, the hypothetical becomes intensely real and really harrowing. Like Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp's sophisticated haunted house movie Presence, the anxiety of letting your kid out into the world becomes its own horror, with genre elements feeding in to make that terror hit like a lightning bolt; it will electrify your nerves and rattle you right down to your bones. So when you walk away from Hallow Road, you'll carry its stomach-churning scares with you, perhaps thinking, "There but for the grace of God go I."
Hallow Road was reviewed out its World Premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival.
