Locke

Director: Steven Knight

Writer: Steven Knight

Starring: Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson

Runtime: 85 minutes

Certification: 15

Rating 4⁄5

Locke is an intriguing premise. Set entirely in the cabin of a BMW (bar a few brief seconds of Locke climbing into his car at the very beginning), and with only one character (the eponymous Ivan Locke) ever visible in the form of a bearded, be-cardiganed Tom Hardy. Everyone else appears in voice only, speaking through Locke’s phone. A big name cast (and a talented one), hidden behind a screen. It’s audacious, if nothing else.

It’s also a concept that errs dangerously close to being something that looks intriguing (and therefore ‘good’) on paper, but stumbles and trips over itself in real life, ending up in a head-on collision with a lorry-full of mediocrity. Fortunately, Locke delivers, smoothly accelerating past mediocrity into something far more interesting (I’ll stop with the motorway metaphors now).

Writer/director Steven Knight’s script is a tightly-wound concoction, a short, sharp burst of 85 minutes (a mixed blessing – the film never outstays its welcome, and the length is tied perfectly to the journey itself into London, but you almost want to see more) that watches as Locke’s carefully controlled life, a delicately designed middle finger to his absentee father, crumbles apart in the face of his determination to do the right thing.

The slow-motion collapse of Locke’s life (although it’s an impressively fast collapse, truth be told) is masterfully tense – details are withheld to be worked out by the audience, dropped as they are firmly in medias res – as cock-ups occur, and myriad obstacles are thrown in Locke’s path, from family, from work, from the past. The conversations roam from desperate attempts to save a marriage, recounting the events of the big football match on television that night, to long-distance manipulation of an operation with zero margin for error, with every second handled beautifully by Hardy.

Without his riveting, magnetic central performance, the film would be adrift. He anchors everything, blending humanity, pragmatism, warmth and conflict to create a character that feels unflinchingly real. You want him to succeed. You will him to. As the various supporting characters (including an excellent Olivia Coleman, continuing her streak of being in every British film ever, and an unrecognisable Andrew Scott) help, hinder or hate him, Locke’s struggles manage to touch on themes far greater than him. As the lights of the other cars on the motorway rush past, blurring into one another, smearing into streaks of colour, it slowly starts to sink that this is far more than a film about a man in a car. It is a film about families, about loyalties, about whether the right thing to do is truly the best thing to do, a film that questions the costs, the consequences, of our actions.