Film review: Hallow Road is a bravura slice of dialogue-driven cinema
Declan Burke: "Both Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys are terrific as parents who find themselves thrust into a nightmarish scenario that offers no simple solutions, while Babak Anvari’s direction is as taut as an overtuned string."
★★★★☆
Every parent will do whatever it takes to prevent their child from making life-changing mistakes, but Hallow Road (15A) begins with a disaster already in train.
When her daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell) rings at two a.m. to tell Maddie (Rosamund Pike) that she has knocked down a young woman on Hallow Road in the remote Ashfolk Forest, Maddie – a paramedic – immediately jumps in the car with Alice’s dad Frank (Matthew Rhys), keeping Alice on the phone so she can administer CPR by proxy.
A tense opening, but that’s only for starters: as Maddie and Frank race through the night to get to Alice before the police can arrive, the fraught circumstances lay bare the fault-lines that threaten to rip apart a previously tight-knit family.
Written by William Gillies and directed by Babak Anvari, Hallow Road is a bravura slice of dialogue-driven cinema. Unfolding in real time, with virtually all of the story confined to the speeding car, it’s a claustrophobic two-hander (we only ever hear Alice on speaker-phone) that combines elements of the thriller and morality play to nerve-shredding effect.
Maddie, the paramedic, is ruthlessly pragmatic in communicating the CPR requirements to her distressed daughter; she is also the parent who insists on Alice facing up to the ethical consequences of her actions.
Frank, for his part, is ostensibly conservative, but quickly jettisons all notions of law and order when he realises that his fragile daughter could very easily go to prison.
Both Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys are terrific as parents who find themselves thrust into a nightmarish scenario that offers no simple solutions, while Babak Anvari’s direction is as taut as an overtuned string.
The result is an utterly riveting psychological thriller.
- (theatrical release)
★★★★☆
The first Final Destination movie debuted in 2000, introducing us to the idea of how cheating Death only briefly delays the inevitable.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (16s) stars Kaitlyn Santa Juana as Stef, the granddaughter of Iris (Brec Bassinger), a woman who, after surviving a near-death experience in the 1960s, has spent the last five decades 'obsessed with all the horrible ways there are to die.’
Haunted by visions of Iris’s experience, Stef is convinced she needs to protect her extended family – including her estranged mother Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt), her younger brother Charlie (Teo Briones) and her cousins Erik (Richard Harmon) – from harm; alas, her family refuse to believe that they are ‘on Death’s hit-list’ because Iris managed to avoid an early demise.
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, this blackly comic horror – the sixth instalment in the series – is an entertaining romp as the characters find themselves at the mercy of ‘Fate’s demented sense of humour.’
The plot doesn’t bear too close a scrutiny, but the set-pieces are neatly executed (and especially the extended prologue, in which a Space Needle-like restaurant suffers a catastrophic collapse), and fans of increasingly inventive methods of bumping off minor cast members will get plenty of bang for their buck here.
- (theatrical release)
★★★☆☆
Magic Farm (15A) stars Chloë Sevigny as Edna, a formerly successful social media influencer whose career is on the skids, and who finds herself – with an inept crew in tow – in the small South American village of San Cristóbal shooting content about an eccentric local musician and his ‘evangelical, apocalyptic temple’.
Unfortunately, her producer got his locations mixed up (i.e., they’re in the wrong country), and so Edna and her bickering team scuffle around hoping to find something else worth filming, all while contriving their own mini-dramas.
Written and directed by Amalia Ulman, this satire on self-absorbed Americans blundering around and stomping all over the indigenous culture has a pleasingly loose, off-the-cuff style that mimics the hapless crew’s scattergun efforts at narrative cohesion.
The characters get a little lost, however, amid all the earnest quirkiness and sub-plots that wander away into irrelevance.
- (theatrical release)
