"Hallow Road" Trailer: Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys Star in This Tense, Real-Time Thriller About a Parents' Desperate Drive to Save Their Daughter
In this twisty psychological thriller, a frantic call from their daughter leads a couple on a chilling journey to a crash site, where things take a dark turn that no one could have expected.
It’s natural for every parent to feel overwhelming anxiety when their child gets their driver’s license for the first time. For a teenager, a driver’s license symbolizes true independence and the freedom to go wherever they want, even if it’s just for a brief period, as long as they return before curfew. But for parents, it’s a moment filled with mixed emotions—pride in their child reaching a new level of maturity, but also fear, knowing their child has no protection from the unknown dangers lurking on the road. So, when that dreaded phone call rings in the middle of the night, a parent almost instinctively knows something’s wrong. It might be a parent's worst nightmare to pick up the phone and hear their distressed child calling in an emergency, with no power to help, other than to say, “Stay right there, we’re coming.” And that journey to reach their child, knowing they can’t undo the past few minutes, just might be the longest drive a parent ever has to make.
Hallow Road, a new twisty real-time thriller, plays with this exact scenario, but it might take moviegoers to places they least expect, with choices and decisions that spiral into darker, more unpredictable territory. It asks, what would you do to protect your child, even if it means crossing certain lines to avoid horrifying consequences? And how can you protect your child when you have no power to alter or change the events leading to this point?
In the upcoming British film, Gone Girl's Rosamund Pike and The Americans' Matthew Rhys star as a married couple awakened in the middle of the night by a frantic phone call from their panic-stricken daughter. She claims she has hit someone with her car in the middle of a hallow road near a darken forest and has no idea what to do next. The victim appears to be not moving, likely dying or dead. So, it becomes a race against the clock for the parents to get to their daughter as soon as possible.
The film, shot in real-time, follows Pike and Rhys’s characters as they drive to their daughter’s crash site. With every agonizing second feeling like an eternity and their minds racing through every worst-case scenario, the couple stays on the phone with their daughter as she explains a situation that increasingly becomes more dire and unpredictable.
Soon, it becomes evident that calling the police or an ambulance might just put their daughter in more trouble than she’s already in. In the heat of the moment, these parents offer advice that’s less about doing the right thing and more about managing the immediate crisis, trying to minimize their daughter’s involvement in a vehicular incident that could have serious legal or personal repercussions.
But there appears to be a darker twist no one saw coming—could this hollow road in the middle of the forest be the home of something sinister, a dark folkloric presence, perhaps? And what if their daughter didn’t hit someone, but rather something? If that’s the case, the parents are facing the terrifying possibility that the incident may not be what it first seemed. And their daughter might be in more danger than they thought.
Following a successful premiere at this year’s SXSW, where it earned rave reviews for its tense real-time suspense, Hallow Road is being compared to films like Steven Knight and Tom Hardy's Locke, which also mostly took place inside a car.
The film is the latest work from acclaimed British-Iranian director Babak Anvari, who made his feature debut with the 2016 Persian-language psychological horror thriller Under the Shadow, a standout at that year's Sundance. Anvari followed that up with his first English-language psychological thriller, Wounds, starring a pre-scandalous Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, and Zazie Beetz, which became a Hulu exclusive in 2019.
With Hallow Road, Babak Anvari may be earning a solid reputation for directing psychological thrillers that lean heavily into horror and the supernatural, but maintain the emotional weight of dealing with such horrific and surreal events.
Written by William Gillies and co-starring Megan McDonnell as the voice of the daughter, Alice, Hallow Road will be receiving a theatrical release in the United Kingdom and Ireland by Universal Pictures starting on May 16th.
As of yet, the film does not have an official US release date, but is expected to be coming to the U.S. theaters sometime in the summer.
