What’s scarier than a dark forest at night? Getting a phone call from your teenage daughter saying she might have just run someone over on that very same road – while being pregnant and high. Now, imagine you’re the parent who has to pick up. Still breathing? Good. Because Hallow Road, Babak Anvari’s new thriller, is here to test your nerves and your imagination, every step of the way.
Anvari, who broke through with his 2015 horror gem Under the Shadow, proves once again that he knows how to wring dread out of everyday spaces. He shot Hallow Road in just 17 days, with Ireland standing in for the haunted exteriors and the Czech Republic (probably for tax reasons – smart man) for the interiors. The film stars Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys as parents thrown into every parent’s nightmare, and Megan McDonnell as their daughter Alice, whose late-night drive sparks the entire ordeal.
A Phone Call That Changes Everything
The movie begins by showing the aftermath of a family dinner that had gone catastrophically wrong. Half-eaten food, some broken glass, Alice stormed out, grabbed her father’s car keys, and vanished into the night. Father escaped his feelings by turning workaholism on, mother went to sleep. Then comes the phone call. Alice’s sobs fill the room: she’s been in an accident, she thinks she’s hit someone who darted out of the woods. She doesn’t know what to do. Neither do her parents, but they get in their car anyway, racing through the night while trying to keep Alice on the line.
This setup may sound simple, but it’s fiendishly effective. The entire film unfolds through voices, reactions, and the claustrophobic space of a moving car. It recalls The Guilty (2018) and Locke (2013), where we, like the characters, only hear fragments of the crisis. The audience has to piece the story together in real time, relying on scraps of sound, fractured conversations, and the rising panic in Pike and Rhys.
It’s storytelling by restriction, and it works beautifully. As French polymath, Jean Cocteau famously said: “Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper”.
A Script That Trusts the Audience
William Gillies’s script brims with twists and turns but never spoon-feeds the viewer. Instead, it treats us like active participants. We’re asked to imagine what lies just beyond the headlights, to conjure images of accidents and apparitions that may, or may not, be real.
Anvari’s directing makes this drip-feed of information feel almost addictive. The opening sequence is already mesmerizing: a long tracking shot down an empty road ends at a girl’s shoes, a simple but chilling hook. A dining room scene shows only the wreckage of a family fight: broken glass, spilled food, silence heavy in the air. Each frame reveals just enough, always hinting, never over-explaining.
And then there’s the script’s thematic bite. Morality, trauma, permissive parenting – all woven in between the shocks. One line in particular lingers: “No parent wants to be their child’s monster.” In a movie about limits that line hits like a punch.
Pike and Rhys: Parents on the Edge
Rosamund Pike, playing a recently resigned paramedic, is riveting. She’s tough, disciplined, and painfully awakened to the fact that being a parent sometimes means saying “no” even when it breaks your heart. Rhys, as her husband, plays the softer foil – quicker to comfort, slower to draw hard lines. Together, they embody the messy dance of modern parenting: when to protect, when to push back, when to admit you don’t know what to do.
Their chemistry feels effortless, helped by the fact that, off-screen, they bonded over jokes during shooting. On screen, though, there’s nothing funny about the stakes. Each whispered reassurance, each rising argument, feels like a fight not just for Alice’s safety, but for the soul of their family.
The Challenge of a Car (and How to Beat It)
Two actors, one car, one night – how do you keep it visually interesting? Enter Anvari and cinematographer Kit Fraser (who also shot Under the Shadow and Eternal Beauty).
Instead of defaulting to basic two-shots or static dashboard angles, Fraser gets creative. Extreme close-ups – sometimes just an eye, sometimes a reflection in glass – turn facial expressions into landscapes of fear. At one point, the camera drifts across Pike’s face in fragments, her disorientation mirrored in floating, tilted images.
The woods themselves become a character. Peaceful by day, menacing by night, their branches twist into claw-like shapes under purple moonlight. Folkloric undertones creep in during the second half, and the road feels less like asphalt and more like a cursed threshold between worlds.
Halfway through, Hallow Road shifts gears. What starts as a straightforward “parents rushing to save their daughter” thriller morphs into something stranger, darker, more folkloric. Superstition seeps into the story. The woods close in. Strange voices on the phone raise more questions than answers.
And then we see the date on the phone: October 31. Of course it’s Halloween night. As if parental guilt and generational trauma weren’t enough, now the supernatural has come to play.
When the Script Trips
If I had to nitpick, the dialogue in the first half occasionally leans too hard into moralizing. Parents debating responsibility and permissiveness is compelling – but sometimes it sounds a little too much like a parenting podcast transcript. Luckily, these moments don’t last long, and the film quickly finds its balance and balance again.
The movie hits its stride where it matters most: in making you question what’s real, what’s imagined, and how far parents should go to protect their child.
Hallow Road isn’t just a clever genre exercise – it’s also about the everyday anxieties of parenting today. How do you set boundaries in a world that blurs them? When do you say “enough” to your child? And what happens when love and fear collide?
If you’re brave enough to take this drive, you can find Hallow Road on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Sky (in the UK), and Rakuten TV. The age rating says 15+, though honestly, the themes might rattle older audiences just as much.
~ by Dora Endre ~
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