"LOCKE" - THE MOVIE

The film, directed by Steven Knight, is gripping, harrowing, and claustrophobic. Nearly the entire movie is filmed inside a moving car with with one character, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), a foreman in the concrete business, talking on the phone with various voices on the other end of the phone. Ivan is on his way to London from the hinterlands at night, in the dark, under great stress. The moving car lights on the road and road lights whizzing by are dazzling, dizzying, and blinding, all of which make for a dangerous ride and sustained suspense for the viewer. Will Ivan make it to London in one piece?

Locke has a cold; he coughs and constantly wipes his dripping nose throughout the film. The viewer sees Ivan's face, arms and hands, surrounded by darkness and never gets a look at the rest of him.

One bad thing after another happens to Ivan all along the way, but we hear about them only through the phone conversations. As Ivan's life begins to fall apart, in a sort of crazed desperation, he talks to his dead bastard of a father about how well he's handling all the problems. At one point, he says, "The Lockes were a long line of shit, but I straightened them out." And yet, and yet, even as he's near the edge, Ivan maintains enough control and sanity to deal with the problems as best he can, with very mixed results.

Hardy as Ivan is superb; words fail to adequately praise his performance. As noted above in the conversations with his dead father, gallows humor (unintended by Ivan) runs throughout the course of the film. I think especially of Ivan's attempts to calm the women on the other end of the phone by repeating, "You're distressed", and to calm those around the women with, "She's distressed". Another instance is when Ivan responds to one of the voices wanting reassurance that everything will work out, "Absolutely!...hopefully" The actors doing the voices on are terrific, too, especially Andrew Scott as Donal, Ivan's assistant on the job.

After watching the movie once, I decided to see it again before I sent the DVD back to Netflix, and I watched once more the following evening. Indeed, I had missed parts of the dialogue that I picked up on the second viewing, so it was a good thing I saw the film again. Not quite so harrowing the second time around, but nonetheless quite enjoyable.