Every now and then a film pops up on my radar with people in it that I do not recognize for the most part that has high ratings and at least somewhat, an interesting-sounding description of the overall plot. Then I see the word "thriller" and I get excited, because a well-done thriller is my favorite kind of movie in existence.
So I settled in to Hallow Road last night hoping to be entertained in a creative way because I had my doubts since I knew nothing about this film and had heard nothing about it. The only reason why I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger was because the ratings on it were quite high and well, i'll get into that in a minute.
The description was something like "two parents get a late night from their daughter about a late-night accident and a race against time to get to her before it is too late." I have paraphrased that from memory but it was something along those lines.
It starts out well enough, with a couple that is sleeping and clearly in a bit of distress as Mom wakes up and answers a late night phone call from her daughter who she is clearly annoyed with for reasons that we learn of later.
Now understand this: There are a couple of things that really annoy me in films and that is people talking extensively on the phone for the sake of reducing the budget and the other is when people argue for long periods of time over things that seem rather meaningless. And this film has both of those right from the start after the initial phone call.
When Mom is on the phone with daughter, Dad emerges from the bedroom and immediately wants to, NEEDS TO, be involved in every single word of the conversation that Mom is in the middle of. He keeps interrupting saying things like "let MEEEE talk to her" and "Where is she?" and other such things that a normal person would just wait until the conversation is done or their is a break in the conversation so he (or she) can get up to speed with what is going on. By him interrupting it just creates tension in both the scene and with me the viewer and it just makes you (the viewer) angry that he won't STFU.
Then they jump into the car to go meet up with their daughter and this is where the rest of the film takes place. In the car the couple continually tries to contact their daughter on the phone over and over and over again and said daughter inexplicably hangs up on them over and over and over again. It is at those points that the parents take a bit of time to argue with one another, when in a time of crisis like this one would think that they would form a very tight team dynamic given that their objective is to get to and help their daughter.
When I looked into a bit further, because I like to know how films are made, I am a bit impressed with all the gear involved in filming almost an entire film on the inside of a car, and I to find that impressive, but this doesn't really change the fact that an entire movie that takes place inside of a car is destined to be a bit boring. Also, the tension created by the increasingly panicky conversations with their daughter would dictate that maybe the parents would violate some road rules such as the speed limit when trying to get to her, but instead we can see the trees moving by out the passenger window at 4cm per second as if they were driving in a school zone when there is a police car nearby.
A few times they step on the gas to get there faster and of course, the other parent says "what are you doing? slow down" or something stupid like that. Lady, you know what I am doing, I want to get there faster and this little magic pedal on the ground enables me to do exactly that!.
90% of the film takes place inside of this car with these two arguing with one another about who gets to talk on the phone until one of them comes up with the brilliant idea of putting it on speaker. Thank the lord! But then they just continue to talk over one another in an increasingly frantic manner.
By the time the 1 hour and 20 minutes is over, I was extremely ready for that to be the case and while I will not spoil it for you, it was a very unfulfilling ending that doesn't make a great deal of sense given the information that we have been given up to that point. There is also a rather convenient incident of a police cruiser just happening to be nearby this very remote location that they were driving towards. That annoyed me but they needed it for the plot.
Should I watch it?
That trailer reveals far too much about the film IMO. It also gives the impression that this is some sort of wildly intense ride the entire way through but that simply is not the case. This film seems like something that would probably make for a decent book or perhaps a radio story before everyone had television, but as a film while I can appreciate what they are trying to do with very little money, it just doesn't land with me. Perhaps this is because thanks to the Koreans I have extremely high expectations of anything that is categorized as a "Thriller."
I feel as though this film got a bunch of reviews to get it up to a certain level on the major rating sites and many of them are not genuine. I can't imagine a normal person watching this movie and then thinking that it was something wildly entertaining. The entire film is just people bickering on the phone for an hour and 20 minutes of exposition.
I had hoped there would be a big payoff for sitting through and hour of frustration but unfortunately that was not the case. I look at the ratings for this on the major sites and can't help but feel like they were orchestrated by the creators and this is increasingly my opinion about a lot of films these days because it is probably easier to rig the ratings that it is to actually make a super-high-quality and inventive film.
I can't with good faith recommend that anyone watch this, especially not in theaters. It is not the fault of the actors though, I think they did the best they could with very limited resources and also space. The film performed quite poorly at the box office and this push with the high review scores now might be an attempt and garnering hype for the release on streaming. I don't know how this industry works but after watching it, that certainly seems like it might be the case.
Good production value considering the obviously low-budget nature of the film, but for me, this is simply not good. The story is sound and perhaps could have been good if they had shown more by taking the story out of the car a bit, but because it takes place almost entirely inside of a car with just the two main actors, it gets really old, really fast.
3/10
