Driven

Every once in a great, long while a movie comes along that doubly astonishes you—first that anybody would even think to try it, and second that they managed to pull it off. Writer-director Steven Knight’s Locke is one of those movies.

Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction foreman in Birmingham, England. As the movie opens, Locke climbs into his SUV and drives away from his construction site. At the first intersection, he signals for a left turn, then suddenly changes his mind and turns right. He’s made a snap decision, which, as the next 85 minutes make clear, is going to change his whole life. Will it be for better or worse? I have my own ideas, but that’s a question that is likely to drive post-screening discussion of Locke for decades to come.

On one level—by far the simplest—Locke is a bravura stunt, brilliantly executed. Once Locke turns the key in the ignition, the entire movie takes place in that car, and Ivan Locke’s face is the only one we see.

But he’s not the only character we meet: Locke is heading to London, and he spends the entire 101-mile trip juggling calls on his hands-free cellphone. Locke is expected home for dinner and to watch an important soccer match with his teenage sons. He’s expected at work the next morning to oversee the most important job of his career, a massive concrete pour beyond anything ever seen in Europe. But his presence is demanded in London, and that’s where he’s decided to go.

As these phone calls proliferate, we learn the kind of man Locke is, what has brought him to this night on this rainy English highway, and we get a glimpse of what his life will be like when his night’s driving is over.

We also learn more than we ever thought we wanted to know about the ins and outs of pouring concrete. That these passages are riveting, even when the talk between Locke and his co-workers becomes most arcanely technical, is a tribute to both Knight’s writing and and Tom Hardy’s performance, which is simply brilliant.

Even these passages give us insight into the rest of Locke’s life. He’s a conscientious man, and we hear it when he talks about the importance of pouring that concrete exactly right: “If the concrete at the base of my building is cracked, if it slips half-an-inch, cracks appear. Cracks appear, and they will grow and grow, and one day the whole thing will collapse. You make one mistake, one little fucking mistake, and the whole world comes crashing down around you!”

The irony of this speech is wasted on Locke, but it’s not wasted on us. Because he’s made that “one little fucking mistake”—in every sense of the F-word—and what we are watching is the appearance of those cracks, and the beginnings of Locke’s world coming crashing down around him.

It’s this spectacle that rivets us, even beyond the sheer technical challenge of mounting the movie itself. For the record, it was rehearsed and filmed in less than two weeks, shot almost in real time, with three cameras in and on the car with Hardy (Haris Zambarloukos’ cinematography is almost abstractly beautiful), while the voice actors spoke on the phone from a nearby hotel. Since the voices are so crucial and so well-done, they deserve mention even though their faces never appear: Ruth Wilson as Locke’s wife Katrina, going from confused to shattered to furious; Ben Daniels as Gareth, Locke’s boss, identfied on his phone screen as “Bastard”; Andrew Scott as Donal, the alcoholic underling terrified at Locke’s having left him in charge; and Olivia Colman as Bethan, Locke’s needy, neurotic partner in a drunken one-night stand that has led to the present crisis.

One character who never appears even on the phone, but whose presence we feel almost as keenly, is Locke’s despised absentee father. It is Locke’s determination not to repeat his father’s abandonment of him that has led to this crisis. In Hardy’s subtle hands, Locke is a good and decent man, and he is doing exactly the wrong thing for all the right reasons. In his resolve to be completely unlike his father, this good man’s conscience is driving him to do exactly what his father did. Sadly, that irony too is lost on him.