Hallow Road (2025)

On a dark night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), with whom they had a giant row that evening. Apparently, Alice stormed off and stole Frank’s car when the parental units got rather angry at her for certain life decisions that don’t bode terribly well for the future they imagined for her.

Anger notwithstanding, Alice is now calling them for help. She has had an accident, struck a girl with her car on a lonely forest road, and doesn’t know what to do. Because the circumstances look dubious, and will become increasingly so the more information Alice shares, Maddie and Frank are driving to help Alice. Maddie’s experience as a emergency rescuer comes in helpful for talking Alice through first aid steps on the girl she injured, at least.

However while the parents are driving on, developments take a rather dark turn or two.

Speaking of the drive, there’s something strange going on there as well, for Hallow Road, where Alice had her accident, seems curiously difficult to reach, as if there were forces at work that have their own ideas about what to do about Alice for the trouble she has gotten herself into, forces rather less willing to tolerate wrongdoing than parents may be.

Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a project that could very well have ended up as merely a gimmick movie of a kind that might have been better realized as an audio play. However, Anvari directs the hell out of a story that consists of two people in a car having a phone call for most of its running time. There’s an admirable sense of focus to Anvari’s work here, as well as clear trust in his main actors to convey desperation, anger, as well as slowly encroaching dread. Which, as actors of a certain calibre are wont to do in cases like this, they repay with the kind of great work that eschews getting too showy while also hitting the proper dramatic notes, suggesting things that don’t need to be told directly.

William Gillies’s script works like clockwork but never feels like one, and handles characterisation as well as it does escalation, while confronting its increasingly fraying characters with a situation where one wrong decision cascades until events become catastrophic. I also loved how the film handles the supernatural, mixing very traditional folkloric tropes in a way that makes them fit perfectly with its psychological thriller base.

To my eyes, Hallow Road is a prime example of how to make creative use of constraints, and how to make a movie out of very basic elements that’s anything but basic.

In short: The Lost World (2001)

For my tastes, this BBC version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel is an exemplary adaptation of a novel with many a problematic aspect (at least from the view of contemporary racial and romantic politics) that would make an unchanged adaption awkward to unpleasant.

So Stuart Orme’s film keeps the general shape of Doyle’s book – in fact, it hews much closer to it than a lot of other adaptations – but changes motivations, details, and characters to something more approachable to contemporary ethics while keeping the charms of old-fashioned adventure, romance, dinosaurs and ape men intact. At the same time, the film never falls into the trap of changing things up for change’s sake, keeping many details of Doyle’s novel intact, and rejigging others in a way that doesn’t so much suggest deconstruction as loving and knowing critique. Many of the changes are of course obvious: what if we look at the hidden plateau’s native human population as if they were actual human beings? Why not have romantic politics not quite as constrained by the horrors of Victorian sexual and emotional values? Why not make Challenger (embodied with a most excellent mix of grouchiness and enthusiasm by Bob Hoskins) slightly more personable (less random hitting of journalists here), and express ambiguity towards Lord Roxton’s (Tom Ward) Great White Hunter-dom? And so on, and so forth.

Personally, in an intellectual climate right now that on all sides tends heavily towards the black and white views of shouty bullies, I also found its pleasant to encounter a movie that does express ambiguity towards Roxton or Victorian values instead of plain loathing, actually trying to understand (perhaps even respect, where possible) the differences instead of going the easy way of total condemnation of everything; there’s quite a bit about the times and their morals that deserve little more than condemnation of course, but going to the effort of actually putting things in context to decide which do and which don’t still is worthwhile.

All this does for the most part work in the film’s background – apart from a kitschy yet likeable bit of ecological and/or anti-colonialist business right at the end – while Orme takes great pleasure in realizing most of the great set pieces of Doyle’s novel and adding various adventure movie standards to boot. Add to that a lively acting ensemble (also including Elaine Cassidy, Matthew Rhys, James Fox and Peter Falk), tolerable to excellent effects, and very pretty photography, and it’s very difficult for me to argue against this version of The Lost World.

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