Film Review: Tom Hardy’s Mesmerizing ‘Locke’ Makes You Question Who You Are

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CHICAGO – It’s impossible to simply play spectator through the forward-moving experimental indie “Locke” without analyzing your own past. And only a zombie could sit through this one-man film without questioning what choices you’d make in Tom Hardy’s shoes.

The 85-minute film, which stars Tom Hardy and features only him on screen simply in a car, isn’t a movie you can simply be entertained by. Though the credits only list Hardy (who played Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises”) along with various other people for their voice work, the other star of the film who is quietly uncredited is you.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

And that is this visionary film’s primary power. From a box-office perspective, the film’s challenge is its small release: only 25 theatres and $112,000 earned domestically over the past week since it opened anywhere. But for those who are able to find it, you’ll see that “Locke” set out to be different on so many levels and succeeds in standing out from the crowd.

Time only moves forward. Never do we dig into Ivan Locke’s past, and interestingly, we don’t need to. We learn that he’s a good man who has made one fatal mistake. He’s decisive and he makes a very daring choice. Whether that choice is right or wrong is up to you to decide, but Ivan sticks by it and accepts the consequences that come with it.

His world comes crashing down in a 85-minute drive to London. You’re but a fly on the wall for the whole drive that actually happens in real time. The film simply moves the camera around the car for its entirety. As a low-budget film that was shot in a mere 8 nights simply with 3 cameras affixed to a car, high-budget films need to remember that character and story matter most. Expensive Hollywood trickery often is filler for a film that is otherwise too weak at its very core.

Read Adam Fendelman’s full review of “Locke”.

While the confined space might sound like it’d be boring because there’s no other cinematic variety, it’s constantly tense and engaging because it’s actually driven by a compelling character with a real-life story. It doesn’t need any other action, special effects or even any other characters on screen.

And because we never see anyone aside from Ivan with our eyes, we actually get to know the other important people in his life through their voices only. We wonder what they look like. We remember them, too, and even their names. This isn’t something that can be said about many films and certainly isn’t often the case about characters we never actually see.

Continue for Adam Fendelman’s full review of “Locke”.

Tom Hardy stars as Ivan Locke in “Locke”.
Photo credit: A24

Continue for Adam Fendelman’s full review of “Locke”.