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Total Film | Locke Review

TF:

One evening, construction foreman Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) leaves his building site, gets in the car and starts driving. As he hits the motorway, he fields anxious phone calls from his wife (Ruth Wilson) and kids, waiting at home to watch the football with him; his boss (Ben Daniels), who’s nervous about the huge concrete pour scheduled for the morning; and his colleague Donal (Andrew Scott), whom he asks to oversee the operation in his absence.

For the first time in his life, he’s going to let them all down. Why? “I have no choice,” he says. And this is not a man given to deviating from the plan.

And that, give or take, is your lot in writer/director Steven Knight’s (Hummingbird) extraordinary real-time one-man drama. Voices blur in and out, headlights strafe the windscreen, and details of Locke’s life accumulate, but we never leave the car and barely leave Hardy’s face.

One evening, construction foreman Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) leaves his building site, gets in the car and starts driving. As he hits the motorway, he fields anxious phone calls from his wife (Ruth Wilson) and kids, waiting at home to watch the football with him; his boss (Ben Daniels), who’s nervous about the huge concrete pour scheduled for the morning; and his colleague Donal (Andrew Scott), whom he asks to oversee the operation in his absence.

For the first time in his life, he’s going to let them all down. Why? “I have no choice,” he says. And this is not a man given to deviating from the plan.

And that, give or take, is your lot in writer/director Steven Knight’s (Hummingbird) extraordinary real-time one-man drama. Voices blur in and out, headlights strafe the windscreen, and details of Locke’s life accumulate, but we never leave the car and barely leave Hardy’s face.