‘Hallow Road’ review: Babak Anvari drives dangerously with Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys

Dir. Babak Anvari. Ireland/Czech Republic, 2025. 80mins

Despite its vaguely-generic title, this well-crafted close-quarters suspense from British-Iranian director Babak Anvari is firmly-written, -shot and -acted. Calling down the same line as Danish drama The Guilty (remade by Netflix), or Tom Hardy-starrer Locke, Hallow Road sees first-time writer William Gillies lace a dramatic mobile phone-led road trip with notes of terror as the protagonists hone in on the titular road in a primal night-time forest. The truly frightening element here, though, is how far ordinary parents will go to protect their offspring.

There’s a lot of careful craft at the wheel of this car

Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys spend most of Hallow Road in a car on speakerphone with their daughter, who has run over and presumably killed a pedestrian. They ground the film in can’t-look-away reality while, outside, elemental horrors may lurk in the witching hours. Pike and Rhys make for a formidable duo against Anvari’s stark interiors, while the well-written interplay of marital tensions sparks. This Irish-Czech co-production may attract mature genre fans, perhaps a few more high-profile festival bookings after its SXSW debut, but an upmarket streamer surely will come calling.

This is Anvari’s fourth feature and his most impressive since the Iran-set Farsi-language Under The Shadow broke out at Sundance in 2016. With his films running from genre to suspense, Hallow Road walks – or drives – a line between the two. Pike’s Maddie is really the lead here: the paramedic mother with anti-depressants in her kitbag who wakes in the middle of the night to a malfunctioning alarm. DoP Kit Fraser’s camera has already surveyed the house as if it was investigating a crime scene: an empty wine bottle, broken glass on the floor, unfinished food, dad Frank (Rhys) asleep on his desk. Then the call comes through: their panicked daughter Alice (McDonnell in a voice-only role), who fled an family argument in her father’s car, has been involved in a hit and run on Hallow Road, a half hour’s drive away.

We don’t know why Alice has run away, or why Maddie is so on edge, or even why Frank is so stridently protective of his daughter. Struggling to insert himself in their conversations, he insists that Maddie takes charge of the situation when it becomes clear that Alice has not notified the authorities. Maddie’s attempts to instruct her daughter in first aid give Pike an opportunity to flex between instinctive authority and the vulnerability of a frightened parent who also knows when her daughter is lying. Rhys, too, pulls off some deft switches, shifting Frank from brash and bullying to fragile and insecure with the tick of an indicator.

There’s a lot of careful craft at the wheel of this car: that indicator, for example, whose light flashes across Frank’s face. Street lights, traffic signals and a glowing console help the space seemingly shift at times of crisis: when Frank takes a wrong turn, or when they realise that Alice isn’t telling the truth. Or, especially, when they hear that another couple has spotted Alice’s lights in the dark, and Hallow Road starts to root itself in the supernatural. It seems that despite the differences arising within this long-term relationship, there’s nothing this couple won’t do for their daughter. Except, that is, to let her go.

Of particular note here is the score by Lorne Balfe and Peter Adams, which plays off a Depeche Mode song called ’Behind The Wheel’, an atmospheric 80s synth track which lends itself perfectly to a dark night of driving through the woods to an unknown fate. The film’s location is never specified, but it shot between Wicklow in Ireland, and the Czech Republic, and certainly the exteriors breathe an air of Celtic mystery over its latter third.