Movie review: Locke

It’s just about a man, a car and a hands-free cellphone device. And it’s utterly intriguing.

Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a site manager on the biggest construction project of his career. He is driving from Birmingham, where he lives, to London on a British motorway in the dead of night, and as the hours pass pieces of his life begin to fall apart.

That just about sums up writer and director Steven Knight’s film, which unfolds in real time and is as compelling in its dramatic intent as a finely textured thriller.

Locke is driving through the night to a London hospital where a woman, about to give birth, lies alone and waiting for his arrival. Although Locke has a family, his one indiscretion has created an untenable situation that only he can solve.

Through a series of urgent phone calls, Locke has to tell his wife that he won’t be home that night, inform his boss that he won’t be at work in the morning and tell the girl in the hospital that he is on his way and will hopefully be in time for the arrival of their baby. The problem for Locke is that it is absolutely essential that he be on his construction site in the morning because a huge amount of concrete will be poured for the base of a tower that is going up in the heart of Birmingham. 

He realises that he’s going to be fired – right then, on the phone – but he’s not shirking his responsibilities. He’s giving his second-in-command (Ben Daniels) a long list of things he has to do. Locke is going to talk him through it. His wife and two sons are expecting him home to watch a football match. To the boys (Tom Holland, Bill Milner), he simply says he will not be there. To his wife (the voice of Ruth Wilson), he has much more to say. The news will be shattering. The girl in the hospital is Bethan (Olivia Colman), someone Locke hardly knows but feels he needs to be there for.

Using a soft Welsh burr, Tom Hardyshows a whole new side to his make-up. There’s not much you can do with your body wedged behind the wheel of a car; it’s all done through his facial expressions and his voice. Hardy is superb.

The disembodied voices of the other characters work well, too. Adding to the intense atmosphere are the lights of passing cars, streetlights, signs and dashboard dials. If anything, Locke illustrates that today’s cinema is not about special effects, but about human emotion.