Hallow Road (2025) review

Publication Date: 11-07-2025

Dir. Babak Anvari

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

Hallow Road was screened as part of AMC Theaters’ “Halloween Double Feature,” alongside Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die. Interjected between the two films was a 10-minute intermission as well as A Busload of Thrills and Cool Casual Comfort, an animated short that spoofs the in-theater Let’s All Go to the Lobby advertisement in wickedly demented fashion. While XYZ Films — the distributor of both films — likely opted to package these films together as a gimmick in hopes it would inspire more impulsive ticket sales, this was a fun way to spend three-and-a-half-hours at the movies.

Being this was the first theatrical wide release for two new releases in a “double feature” presentation since Grindhouse back in 2007, it goes to show how seeing two movies for the price of one can still inspire excitement and intrigue. Tis pity general audiences seem as adverse to the concept as they do subtitles.

Parents Frank and Maddie (Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike, respectively) are awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from their teenage daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell). Context clues from the first few minutes of the phone call tell us what we need to know. Alice got into an argument with her parents, got into her car, and drove off into nowheresville. On the phone, crying, frantic, Alice tells her parents that she accidentally struck a young woman in the depths of the woods on the eponymous road.

The first 20 minutes masterfully set the stage. Director Babak Anvari and screenwriter William Gillies basically cultivate a three-person stageplay, and show the friction between Frank and Maddie and their souring marriage through subtle means. For example, when Alice first rings Maddie’s phone, Maddie ignores her husband’s insistence to turn on speakerphone, already signaling distrust and tension. Maddie is a paramedic too, so when the parents set out on the 40-something minute ride to Hallow Road in the dead of night, she guides her daughter through basic CPR techniques despite the frequent interruptions of her husband.

Frank isn’t a villain, however. He’s a lawnmower father, if anything; someone who wants to clear obstacles his daughter might face with the hopes that nothing will get in the way of her finishing university and on a path to a fruitful existence. Frank’s instincts tell him to instruct Alice on how he can assume responsibility for her actions. Maddie, however, tries desperately to have her daughter keep the victim alive.

Much of the film works because so much is put on the shoulders of Rhys and Pike, who handle their roles valiantly. I’m convinced Rosamund Pike could spend two hours reading us the Yellow Pages and it would make for an experience worthy of the big screen. Pike also flexes her talents as a disembodied voice of a woman, who finds Alice in the midst of her roadside predicament. It wasn’t until the end credits that I was aware that voice belonged to Pike. I assumed Anvari or someone related to the production got ahold of an English narrator of children’s books and decided she could weaponize her voice to sound menacing.

For a little over an hour, Hallow Road grips and rips. It entraps you in a helpless situation, confining you to a vehicle with a bickering couple, on the phone with a panicked teenager, on a long, winding dark road. Unfortunate is the final 15 minutes, which shift the film from grounded realism to the territory of traumatic response, the likes of which Gillies’ script isn’t prepared to tackle. Prior to that, ideas of parental overreach and paganism are also proposed, but the writing wants to take complicated ideas and hamfist them into a clean conclusion barely worthy of scribbles on a napkin — the likes of which feels disingenuous.

Hallow Road is the kind of movie Rod Serling would’ve loved. It’s concise, tense, and very well choreographed, despite mostly being confined to a vehicle. Cinematographer Kit Fraser finds every where to make a direct, windshield shot of two people interesting, including having the digital dashboard reflect on the faces of Pike and Rhys to doomy effect — heightened by Peter Adams and Lorne Balfe‘s techno-driven score. How do you accurately summarize a film that had you hooked for, say, 85% of its runtime yet lost you in the waning minutes? You appreciate the journey. You dislike, and unfortunately remember, the destination.

NOTE: Take a listen to my interview with composer Lorne Balfe, where we discuss the score for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and more: