Review: Locke

The charismatically-named Ivan Locke (perhaps more suited to a medieval warlord) gets into his BMW and starts driving. He doesn’t leave the car for the rest of the film, nor do any other characters appear physically. Instead, all the action of Locke unfolds over the phone. Welsh builder Ivan is in the middle of a personal crisis, which also affects his professional life, and throws out instructions telephonically during a nocturnal commute to London. The tale doesn’t tell whether he has a forgiving mobile package. As scant as that information is, any more would tamper with the experience. The teasing out of information, and Locke’s attempts to fix everything, are the central premise of Steven Knight's latest production.

Wearing a country gent’s shirt more suited to Nigel Farage than a builder, Tom Hardy is predictably the central attraction of the show. Without an actor able to blend realism and force of personality, Locke would have flopped. Many of Hardy’s characters have thus far been extroverted, boldly charismatic and brashly noticeable. This was the opposite, almost as if Hardy wanted to prove that he could act in the Bogart school of understated expressions. The stress and mental strains start to seep through the concrete expression of calm collection as the evening wears on. What seems random is Ivan’s thick Welsh accent. Why? What was the point? Maybe Hardy was so used to silly accents from Batman that he couldn’t act without one. Not being a Welshman myself I am unable to say how good it was, but I did think that at moments it bordered on Indian. Either way, it was an inexplicable linguistic insertion. Nonetheless, Hardy proved yet again why he is a constant critical success, driving the plot as easily as the BMW.

Ivan is a builder, more specifically a concrete specialist. It is understood that he is the best in the business, always ahead of paperwork and running a tight ship. But the night before the biggest concrete pour in Europe (outside of military nuclear works, we are told), he absconds to deal with bigger issues. His bosses are furious, but Ivan tries to manage it all from his car. His adherence to building with concrete borders on the obsessional, so the professional side of the story is a way of showing how this controlling man tries to deal with messy life. Ivan acts in such a rigid fashion to avoid being like his father, yet has ended up in a very similar position. Is this because the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, or that life is not as controllable as concrete? There is no formula for love or happiness. Ivan is essentially a decent man, but a moment of weakness has left him unable to un-hurt those closest to him.

Locke has been described in some quarters as a thriller. But it doesn’t rely on twists, so cannot really be described as a thriller per se. Instead, it is a character study, seemingly more suited to the theatre than cinema. It has been written so tightly and acted so superbly that it is elevated from simply a commute down the M40 (without even stops at periodic Little Chefs) to a tense personal voyage. Whilst not nail biting, as some have suggested, Locke is delightfully claustrophobic. Whereas a film usually pulls away from a location after a while, viewers are forced to remain in the car with Ivan’s strifes mounting. The petty annoyances of having to contact a council official busy in a curry house and memorise mobile numbers niggle at the audience. On top of that is the major familial plot, which lifts the enterprise into film-worthy levels.

Perhaps Locke is a comment on the state of modern man. The existentialist crises that face our society's young chaps are reflected in Ivan: having to act like a man but feeling like they are being blamed for it; taking responsibility and doing the right thing even though that will be condemnation; the negatives of masculinity without the positives. Certainly Locke echoes the thoughts of If-, about (if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you), a twenty-first century act of stoicism because, as Ivan repeats, 'it is the right thing to do'. With this in mind I would imagine it to be a film more suited to men than women. But maybe I'm wrong.

While the shooting style is fairly minimal, there is room for quite a few expressionistic out-of-focus shots of streetlights and car bonnets. The angles shift from one side of the vehicle to another, and bursts of lyricless music stimulate a feeling of stifling doom. Although not always a comfortable watch, Locke is gripping, compelling, and all those other descriptions a psychological semi-thriller should be.

Hardy does 'stressed'