Showing @ Cineworld, Glasgow, Sun 23 & Mon 24 Feb
Steven Knight / UK/USA / 2013 / 85 mins
Briefly shrugging off his Hollywood celebrity, Tom Hardy stars in this unassuming low-fi thriller written and directed by Steven Knight. Ivan Locke (Hardy) is a loving family man known as a respectable and hard-working cement pourer. The film starts as Locke pulls away from work, but rather than returning home, he begins a journey to put right the single blot on his otherwise pristine reputation.
Set entirely in the car, the plot gradually unravels through a series of phone calls. The sense of urgency as Locke attempts to manage his career’s biggest pour, reasoning/pleading with his wife and calming down his ashamed one-night-stand (who’s in labour), is reflected in the constant on-screen motion – particularly the staccato lamppost flashes on the windscreen. With the cellular bombardment of emotions it would’ve been easy for Hardy to descend into melodrama but he reins it in, letting it simmer behind his eyes as he desperately clings onto control, allowing only a few expletive eruptions. The tension continually mounts because of the disconnected gaps breaking up each dialogue thread, added to by an unnerving soundtrack of drawn out strings. Wilfully damaging both his professional and home lives, it’s Locke’s guilt of having had a neglectful father himself, seen in his insidious soliloquies to the rear-view-mirror, which painfully explains the driving force behind his actions.