“Hallow Road” is built around a long drive to a spooky English wood where a tragedy has occurred, but by the time the movie reaches its final destination, some viewers will be slumbering like a baby in a car seat on a highway. There’s a lot of promise here. But too much of it is wasted on bizarre decisions and crushed by the movie’s lumbering, misshapen rhythm. And the ambiguous ending feels like it belongs on a scarcely remembered work of 1960s art cinema that you might watch because a critic described it as unjustly forgotten, only to realize that it was forgotten quite justly.
Save for its last scene, “Hallow Road” is a three-person play on wheels. A couple of parents, Frank and Maddie (Matthew Rhys and Rosamunde Pike), are awakened at 2 a.m. by their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), who stormed out of the house after arguing with them. Instead of going home to a flat she shares with her Polish boyfriend Jakob, Alice drives 42 miles to the eponymous stretch of road to clear her head (i.e., do MDMA), and accidentally hits a young female pedestrian.
Frank and Maddie aren’t in a good place emotionally, either, as we realize when Maddie fields the first phone call from Alice and refuses her husband’s increasingly strident demands to put the girl on speakerphone. The bickering continues during the drive to Alice’s location, even while Maddie, a paramedic, is guiding her daughter through basic CPR techniques.
When the accident victim dies, the movie threatens to become a cover-up story. Maddie wants to notify the police and get Alice to accept responsibility and take whatever punishment is given because she was driving while intoxicated on a winding forest road far from home. But Frank pressures Alice to drag the poor girl’s body off the road and into the forest, then tries to convince his wife and daughter to sign off on him lying to the police by claiming he was the one driving the car, so Alice can finish university and not have her life “ruined.”
Maddie and Frank’s anxious back-and-forth on the way to the crash site (with Alice chiming in) plays strangely flat despite committed performances by the two leads. Both Pike and Rhys are skilled enough to carry the visual component of the movie with their faces whenever the characters listen to Alice’s end of the call. Still, that virtuoso display, along with many others, is in the service of selling what shouldn’t have to be sold. More awkwardly, Maddie and Frank each have spotlight moments where they excavate subtext with a backhoe and deliver monologues that explain some of their behavior.
At a certain point, things take a turn for the strange, and not in a good way. A film that at first seemed like it was going to be a realistic psychodrama built around a motor vehicle accident morphs into something else, then goes back to what it was before, then goes through several more incarnations, none developed with enough care to make them seem like more than the movie trying on various genre identities to see how they feel. Intimations of pagan magic, ancient mythology, and fairy tales enter the movie but don’t amount to much. “Hallow Road” likewise squanders its potential as a morality play by abandoning most of the conundrums it raises. Then has the nerve to return to morality play mode for its final scene, which implies that the wild and horrible things that occurred that night are cosmic punishment. The entire project suggests what might have happened if Rod Serling had let a stoner beatnik nephew guest-write a “Twilight Zone” episode.
Aside from a few graphically striking sections, such as a mosaic of tight closeups during a long section of Frank and Maddie just listening and reacting, much of the road trip is hampered by awkward, dull staging, and there are moments where it seems as if no one involved with the production remembered that the audience needs to believe these actors are in a real car on a real road at all times. There are moments where Frank looks like he’s not driving the car, but sitting in the driver’s seat while it’s being towed to a repair shop. In a lot of two-shots of the couple together in the front seat, it’s impossible not to fixate on the plain fact that they’re on a soundstage in front of a screen. Their journey is physically way too smooth. Is this the only road in England with no potholes?
This is a tricky movie to praise, pan, or even write about at length. The story is dependent on viewers being surprised by where things go. Hopefully, no one writing about it is enough of a grump to reveal every single twist and turn just to justify not liking the movie, because that would be unsportsmanlike. At the same time, however, none of the stuff that has to be protected for the sake of the audience’s viewing pleasure is actually worth protecting. So let’s say “Hallow Road” is an earnest attempt to make a movie no one has seen before, only to end up with one few will want to watch again.
