Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) is a man who has recently gotten an urgent call: A woman he had an affair with is having a child, and it is his. Spurred on by the memory of his own absent dad, he seeks to hold both his marriage and his job together from the driver's seat while driving to meet his new child. This results in the entire setting being the confined space of Locke's car, where he has to manage his life through phone calls. In the typical "talky drama", characters tend to speak face-to-face, with occasional phone calls. Locke instead elects to only show one man's face, and hold all the conversations at a distance. This is an intriguing modern take on the genre, keeping the cast to Hardy and a collection of disembodied voices. It puts a lot of pressure on Hardy to hold a strong performance, and he holds the entire film on his shoulders with ease. However, the endless phone calls does get repetitive after some time, and it causes Locke to become tiring near the end.
Perhaps one of Locke's biggest issues is just how limiting its premise is. The cinematography is exhaustive in its search for ways to keep the film visually interesting, but there are many shots which look awfully similar. Keeping in the car limits how much can be done on the camera, but thankfully that seems to be a fair deal. Angles and filters in particular are used to change the mood of the film's single scene. By keeping the setting so limited, cinematography is distilled to the camera and its tricks, and it's very apparent how the same scene has a completely different feel based on how it's shot.
Locke himself is an interesting character. He's written with depth, and changes subtly over the course of the film. As we see him more, though, he grows less sympathetic. The character pushes his co-workers too hard and has a serious chip on his shoulder, and then there's the fact of his affair that the movie is centred around. Other characters are also richly textured, which is communicated with great dialogue. For a movie taking place mostly over phone calls, the dialogue needs to carry the film, and Locke is up to the task.
However, the narrative itself grows somewhat convoluted in parts. So many things are happening at once in Locke that suspension of disbelief gets challenged, and putting a number of huge events on the same day makes the story seem a bit much. Still, as a storytelling experiment, Locke is wildly successful, showing off what can be done in minimal circumstances.
Many may be turned off by Locke's minimal use of setting and the presence of only one face in the movie, but this storytelling experiment is highly successful, in no small part due to Hardy's performance. It has some issues, but as a whole it's a greatly captivating film.
8/10
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