Critics reviews

Written and directed by Steven Knight, Locke operates like a thriller, and yet the only action is a man in a car. Yet it is a grueling experience, an exhausting emotional cliffhanger... The film is a wrenching unforgettable experience. You forget that it's just Tom Hardy in a damn car. You feel the whole WORLD around this guy. And there's no way out but through. Call by call by call …

The challenge of how to classify [Locke] may be part of the problem: it's generally described as some sort of tour de force (given that it is 84 minutes of Tom Hardy driving while talking to colleagues, family, and acquaintances on the phone), which may be a backhanded and misleading description insofar as the film is not so much a stunt as a story that couldn't be told any other way.

Shot almost entirely in close-ups and from the neck up, rarely out of frame and reflected in mirrors and windshields in the rare moments that he's not speaking, Hardy is the entire movie, and he tears into the task with the appetite of a lean up-and-comer rather than the self-satisfaction of a grandstanding movie star.

Its matter-of-fact conclusion may leave viewers in a sort of blue-balls state, surprised or even baffled by the film's final refusal to provide any twist on such a grounded scenario, but it's fairly clear that, on a narrative level, Locke doesn't overstep its boundaries. With so many spring releases at the multiplexes trying to ingratiate their audiences with razzle-dazzle... this unexpected storytelling economy is worth recognizing and applauding.

The conceit is riveting at first because Knight forgoes any backstory or exposition, though as the foreman's plight becomes clear, the tension quickly dissipates. Visually the film is a Dogme 95-esque exercise in minimalism and available resources; Knight uses passing streetlights and reflections in the car's windows to dreamy, impressionistic effect, but this is dispelled by Hardy's garrulous scene chewing.

The film's formal box is one that felt, to me at least, potentially Pinteresque, and Knight comes up with pauses and quasi-aphoristic bits of dialogue—"You sound different."/"I am the same." goes one representative exchange, and, later, one character rages "The difference between never and once is the difference between right and wrong"—that recall/honor the late maestro while conveying their own uncomfortable truths.

Knight's film is an ode to the unique anxiety of being behind the wheel of a car, and Hardy's performance, his best since Bronson, is acutely attuned to how driving on a modern motorway inspires a rare sense of control, then guts it by hemming drivers in between narrow lines of road, paint, and one-way traffic. Hardy carries the entire film on his shoulders with seeming ease, creating a clear hierarchy of Locke's agendas...

Although his mouth is partly obscured and its natural red color tempered by some of the directing choices, including the dusky digital cinematography... Mr. Hardy's deliberate, largely hushed delivery and the Welsh accent he's affected draw attention to his mouth — to how he talks, not just what he says. Mr. Knight keeps a fairly steady distance from Ivan... but moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it's Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger's face into a life.

As a director, Knight makes much of this confined space, keeping close to Locke's face but also making great use of the reflections of headlights and street lamps in the car's windows and shiny sides. It's a brilliant performance from Hardy, who delivers an impeccable, oddly comforting Welsh accent and feigns calm and control even as his character falls apart. The result is a master class in how the most local and hemmed-in stories can reverberate with the power of big, universal themes.

In the way it slowly completes the picture of Ivan's self-annihilation, with the nuances of one phone call often illuminating the subtext of another, Knight's screenplay is thrilling in its prismatic composition. But the filmmaker's obsession with space is entirely limited to his boxed-in setting and the emotional fireworks the pent-up Ivan risks setting off throughout; his only visual signature is the easy effect of rendering passing cars as out-of-focus blobs of light.

In less steady hands, such a premise might have succumbed to dramatic contrivance or even tedium, but Knight's personal-feeling script is witty, well-structured, and nicely detailed (the burly Locke has a sniffling cold throughout), while the film's technical credits are impeccable. Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos deserves credit for keeping the restricted space visually interesting by finding countless angles and positions to shoot from...

With a director who is first and foremost a writer, it's no wonder that the many people at the other end of Ivan's phone conversations come across as fleshed-out characters, making for a dynamic, actively engaged part of the story. While the structural gimmick could have quickly gone stale, Knight's script keeps angling for those authentic moments of human interaction, with drama and even humor aplenty.