Hallow Road ★★★★

Released: 16 May 2025

Director: Babak Anvari

Starring: Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys

Let’s talk about fear. Not the jump-scare or monster-in-the-closet kind, but the creeping existential dread that arrives when the road home warps into something unrecognizable. That’s the kind of fear Hallow Road traffics in—slow-burning, psychological, and suffocating in the best way possible.

Rosamund Pike has long been one of Britain’s most versatile actors. Whether navigating emotional ruin in Gone Girl, channelling icy satire in I Care a Lot, or exploring war-torn trauma in A Private War, Pike consistently delivers full-body, soul-baring performances. In Hallow Road, she’s on top form once again, this time in a minimalist, near one-woman show that unfolds almost entirely inside a car.

Pike plays Maddie Finch, a criminal defence solicitor with a tightly wound life and a strained marriage to Frank (voiced by Matthew Rhys, heard over phone calls). Driving back late at night from an emotionally charged prison visit, Maddie finds herself rerouted by her navigation system down a desolate woodland road. At first, it’s just a nuisance—dark, isolated, and unfamiliar. But when she seemingly hits something with the car and finds nothing outside, panic sets in. The phone signal drops. The road seems to loop endlessly. And Maddie begins to hear things—voices, radio static, and eventually, someone calling her name.

What begins as a tense detour morphs into a metaphysical breakdown. The road is no longer just a road—it’s a trap, a liminal space where time, guilt, and memory collapse. Pike’s Maddie is unravelling, and we’re right there with her, trapped in the claustrophobic frame of the vehicle, watching as the night eats away at her grip on reality.

It’s a brave and stripped-back directorial move from Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow, Wounds), who leans into atmosphere over exposition. The film, penned by William Gillies, resists easy genre classification—part mystery thriller, part psychological horror, part grief-soaked character study. Think Locke meets The Vanishing, filtered through the creeping dread of The Machinist. At just 80 minutes, Hallow Road is a lean, nerve-jangling descent into the darkest recesses of one woman’s mind.

The film’s power lies in its discipline. There’s no gratuitous flashbacks or over-explained twists. We are left to interpret the strange sounds, shifting road signs, and phantom radio broadcasts through Maddie’s perspective. And Pike? She’s phenomenal. The fear is never melodramatic—it’s lived-in. We see her cycle through anger, confusion, determination, and deep, aching regret. Her voice cracks not from terror, but from the slow, unbearable realisation that this journey is more than just physical.

Kit Fraser’s cinematography is deceptively simple—mostly tight in-car framing, but with an incredible sense of mood. The fog-blanketed road outside becomes almost ghostly, a purgatory between past and present. Rear-view mirrors catch glimpses of things that shouldn’t be there. Occasional flickers of taillights in the distance provide false hope. Every inch of the screen is used to build tension, with visual cues that reward close attention.

The sound design by Robert Ferrin is another standout, turning silence into suspense and layering static, whispers, and groaning metal into something that feels alive. It’s in these moments that the horror creeps in—not as jump-scares, but a rising tide of dread.

And then there’s the score, composed by Peter Adams and Lorne Balfe, which acts as the film’s emotional and psychological anchor. Balfe, known for his sweeping orchestral arrangements, teams up with Adams to create something far more intimate and unrelenting here. Their music pulses under the surface of Maddie’s growing hysteria, often whispering rather than shouting. Dissonant strings blend with low industrial hums. A haunting piano motif drips in and out like memory. It’s a score that doesn’t overwhelm—it stalks. And in a film so reliant on tension, their composition becomes as crucial as any line of dialogue or twist of the wheel, deepening the atmosphere and giving the psychological breakdown an almost mythic weight.

Matthew Rhys, heard mostly via speakerphone, adds a grounded emotional counterweight as Frank. Their strained exchanges hint at a shared loss—a tragedy that’s never fully spelled out, but whose absence defines Maddie’s emotional state. There’s also a deeply chilling moment involving the voice of their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), which pierces through the fog like a knife and sends Maddie—and the viewer—spiraling further into uncertainty.

As the film races (or rather, crawls) toward its final act, the mystery of what’s happening becomes secondary to the emotional truth behind it. Yes, there are narrative revelations, some of which lean slightly too explanatory in contrast to the film’s previously elegant ambiguity. But the emotional payoff is earned. What Hallow Road ultimately reveals is a raw, unfiltered look at unresolved grief and denial, wrapped in the body of a slow-burn thriller.

Hallow Road doesn’t scream for attention. It whispers your name in the dark—with a spine-tingling intensity that lingers long after the credits roll.