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For all the ghouls and goblins that might be hiding deep in the woods around Hallow Road, there’s nothing near as frightening as passing the point of no return. We live by our certainties – dawn by dawn, plan by plan – only for a momentary choice, the smallest of mistakes, to veer us wildly off course and pull our stomachs into the depths of hell.
It’s that feeling that pervades Babak Anvari’s sickeningly effective Hallow Road. It combines the dread that washes over a couple (Rosamund Pike’s Maddie and Matthew Rhys’s Frank), when they’re told their daughter has run someone over while driving through the remote countryside, with an unexpected detour into the realm of folk horror.
There’s been an argument. Visiting home from university, Alice (the voice of Megan McDonnell), has driven off in Frank’s car, leaving her parents to fret and quietly lick their wounds. Suddenly, she’s on the phone and in hysterics. There’s a girl lying out in the road. She seems dead. An ambulance has been called but Alice hung up on them. Maddie’s a paramedic, can’t she help? They’re her parents, can’t they fix this somehow?
Anvari follows Maddie and Frank outside, as the inviting elegance of 16mm slides into the cold, aesthetic chamber of digital, right when the camera travels through the windscreen and into the car where they’ll (and we’ll) spend the next hour or so. We never see Alice, but we hear her snivels and desperate pleas to mum and dad, all while cinematographer Kit Fraser manipulates this confined space for its greatest narrative potential.
What is the furthest extent of a parent’s responsibility to protect their child? And at what point does that protection merely become a benevolent means of control? Maddie and Frank clash over what they believe is best for their daughter, as Pike and Rhys work through each page of William Gillies’s script with a delicate and attentive eye to emotional detail. He froths and rages, only to then wither away and become childishly pathetic. She plays Maddie with a tighter control, yet infuses a tragic aftertaste into each word of caution, in a way we only come to understand at a critical point of revelation.
Anvari leaves out a little trail of breadcrumbs: an odd turn of phrase, the crooked bend of the trees, a crack or a screech that rings with an unnatural timbre (at one point, I could have sworn a tracking shot through the car’s interior revealed something horrific, but I may have just imagined it). But there’s a definitive moment in Hallow Road where it all changes, where eerie new voices on Alice’s side of the conversation start to talk of pagans and faeries.
Anyone with enough knowledge of old ghost stories and even older folk tales can guess where this all eventually leads, and where Gillies’s inspiration lies. Yet Anvari, as with his memorable debut Under the Shadow (2016), about a Djinn haunting a mother and daughter in Eighties Tehran, approaches more traditional supernatural beliefs with an elegant sense of restraint. There are several ways to interpret Hallow Road’s climax, and each has something to say about life’s consequences. What fundamentally drives the film is that terrible feeling of inevitability. “You always call us,” Maddie tells Alice. “We give you an easy way out.” Not always.
Dir: Babak Anvari. Starring: Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell. Cert 15, 80 minutes.
‘Hallow Road’ is in cinemas from 16 May
English (US) ·