How encouraging that whatever state our film industry is considered to be in, it can still find space for a crackingly good script from a supersmart, disciplined first-timer who’s clearly been working on it for a while, planing down the edges and trimming away the fat through successive drafts. Hallow Road is the kind of property that often emerges after a spell on Hollywood’s “Black List” of much admired but as yet unproduced screenplays. It is a gripping, real-time suspense thriller with a twist of the macabre, a film about family guilt and the return of the repressed, written by National Film and Television School graduate William Gillies, a scary-movie enthusiast who here makes his feature script debut. British-Iranian film-maker Babak Anvari directs and Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike give forthright, excellent performances as the two leads.
Rhys plays Frank, a stressed executive married to Mads (Pike), a paramedic. They have one child, Alice, a troubled and vulnerable student played by Megan McDonnell who only appears in the film as a terrified voice on the end of the phone – that being a jarring contrast to her perky leave-a-message voice which her anguished parents keep reaching. Her smiling face which comes up on their phone is also, we can assume, a jarring contrast to her actual face.
