My streaming gem: why you should watch Locke

Continuing the series where writers recommend underappreciated films available to stream, a call to watch and admire Tom Hardys single-location masterwork

At first glance, Stephen Knights 2013 single location road movie Locke might seem like an antithetical quarantine watch. The plot, which revolves around a concrete pour, and takes place entirely within the claustrophobic confines of a slate grey BMW X5, is not exactly escapist fare for those negotiating the mundanity of life under lockdown. Yet 85 minutes trapped in a car with Tom Hardy turns out to be a transfixing, transporting experience.

Written and directed by Knight (whose screenwriting credits include Stephen Frears Dirty Pretty Things and David Cronenbergs Eastern Promises), the minimalism of its design lends itself particularly well to low-key, at home viewing. Hardy is Ivan Locke, a construction manager driving from Birmingham to London on a Friday night. A series of phone calls conducted over his cars Bluetooth speaker reveal that Ivan is en route to the hospital, where an ill-advised one-night stand is about to give birth. If things werent high pressure enough, his wife and kids are waiting for him at home, and in the morning hes supposed to oversee the biggest single concrete pour in all of history, outside wartime. He must coordinate 218 trucks and 55 metric tonnes of wet concrete. Remotely. This morning, I had a job, a wife and my children. Now all I have is this phone, and this car, Ivan mourns. The set-up is lo-fi, but Hardy manages to make the stakes feel huge.

Premiering out of competition at the Venice film festival, Locke was a hit with critics if not exactly a box office smash. The film was released as Hardy was exploding into mainstream Hollywood, a year after his turn as Bane in Christopher Nolans The Dark Knight Rises. Hindsight makes watching action hero Hardy descend into a controlled, sweaty panic (while kitted out in cozy knitwear) its own odd thrill. The actor was not yet Mad Max or Venom, and so its fun watching him so fully inhabit such an unshowy role, actorly seriousness uncorrupted by star power. Hardy is bolstered by voicework from actors whose respective celebrity pedigrees have also since grown, including Bafta-winner Olivia Colman, Spider-Mans Tom Holland, and Fleabags Andrew Hot Priest Scott, who is particularly dynamic as Ivans drunken second-in-command Donal. Mainly though, its a one man show on the road; for the duration of the film, Hardys face is the only one we see on screen. That hes able to create so much drama while working with so little is a feat of economy.

It helps, of course, that Ivan is so specific on the page. A control freak in a jumper, he is a meticulous master planner and an agent of his own destiny. You dont trust God when it comes to concrete, he insists. Which of course, makes it funnier, and all the more tragic as his iron-fisted grasp begins to slip.

Ivans response to the chaos unfolding around him, all of which is of his own making, is exasperated but unfeeling pragmatism. The traffic is fine, so itll be OK, he reassures himself. When baby mama Bethan (Olivia Colman), 5cm dilated, asks if he loves her, he dodges the question, coldly suggesting that she likely asked because shes in pain or something. Quite incredibly, he never apologises to wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) for his infidelity. He shoulders responsibility without ever accepting blame. In work and life, Ill fix it becomes his refrain. The American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum thinks of the film as an existential western that essentially focuses on the heros endurance. I like to think of Ivan Locke as more of an antihero a fascinating, credible study of an unlikable, emotionally repressed modern man.

The film is a favourite of my friend Ashley Clark, the director of programming at arthouse cinema BamCinematek in Brooklyn, New York, who had scheduled a special screening as part of a series On Solitude and has described it as the most keenly-observed film ever made about a strain of absurdly intransigent, peculiarly maudlin British masculinity. The films sense of humour is distinctly, drily British, too. Hardy adopts a lilting Welsh accent, delivering lines like Do it for the concrete! in earnest. Im in an Indian restaurant! shouts council head Cassidy (Danny Webb), barely audible over the din of curry house chatter. It is Friday night, after all.

• Locke is available on Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK

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