Like Gravity and All Is Lost, Steven Knight‘s Locke (A24, 4.25) is a gripping survival story about an isolated protagonist (in this instance an industrial construction foreman played by Tom Hardy) grappling with a series of intense, life-threatening challenges…tough terms, face up to them, do or die. But Locke is a much more engrossing drama than Gravity and the exact verbal opposite of the all-but-silent Lost. We’re only three months into 2014 but Locke is easily one of the best films I’ve seen thus far, and I’m including Captain America: The Winter Soldier and those eight Sundance films that I admired.
The 85-minute running time happens entirely inside a BMW SUV on the motorway between Birmingham and London, and it’s all about bluetooth phone calls. Hardy is behind the wheel the entire time. But what pushes the film along is the stuff of any compelling drama — character, tough decisions, adult pressures, guilt, tragedy, trauma and suspenseful twists and turns.
