Tom Hardy mesmerises as a man dealing with crisis on all fronts, making and taking frantic phone calls as he steers his BMW through the night. Steven Knight’s breathless feat of real-time drama is set entirely inside the car.
It’s a powerhouse of claustrophobic suspense and fierce emotion, mostly because Tom Hardy is a blazing wonder.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2014
Locke 2013
Writer-director Steven Knight’s Locke is a breathless tour de force of script and performance. Actor Tom Hardy steers his BMW through the night and makes and takes calls on his hands-free phone for the entirety of the film. He has us on tenterhooks.
“You’ve never seen Tom Hardy summon the bottled-up desperation and emotional range he displays in Steven Knight’s brilliant one-man show, Locke. Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a successful construction supervisor who, at the outset of the film, gets behind the wheel of his BMW and starts driving to London at night. Through a series of phone calls, his dire circumstances slowly come into focus. The crisis that he’s racing toward has put his job, his family, and maybe even his sanity at risk. He’s a responsible man – a man used to being in control – and he’s frantically trying to extinguish a series of blazes without losing his cool. If it sounds like I’m being cagey about what happens next, that’s because it’s best to know as little as possible going in. The snowballing sense of tension and claustrophobia is too precious – and precise – to spoil.” — Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
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