'All they have is anxiety and imagination'

Rosamund Pike ands Matthew Rhys star in Babak Anvari’s tense thriller Hallow Road - in cinemas now

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When a parent gets a call from their upset child in the dead of night, it never stops being worrying, even when they’re all grown up. Thus, when Maddie and Frank hear the voice of their daughter Alice in the small hours of the morning, sobbing that she has run over a girl on a forest road, they jump straight in the car to come and find her.

Alice promises Maddie, her paramedic mother played by Gone Girl and Saltburn’s Rosamund Pike, that she’s called 999 and an ambulance is on the way to her on the wooded Hallow Road, and she begins CPR following her mother’s instructions. Her father Frank, played by Emmy-winning The Americans star Matthew Rhys, disagrees, wanting to save his daughter from the trauma of trying to save the life of a girl who, he imagines, has clearly died.

The drama of Hallow Road, directed by Babak Anvari - also at the helm for 2019's Wounds starring Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson-slowly unfolds into darkest horror, the family crumbling under pressure as they race towards the scene of the crime, not knowing that something even more sinister awaits.

"When I read it, I was immediately hooked,” says Anvari of William Gillies’ script for Hallow Road.

“And I think the challenge of it being 90 per cent in the contained space of a car, as a filmmaker, was like: Wow.

“I always say filmmakers are masochists, so the tougher the challenge, the better for us. So I was immediately like: ‘Well, there’s a lot of tension, but how to maintain that tension within such a contained space?’ I think that was the initial hook. And then, of course, the dynamic between the characters and this family, it was just so meaty for me.”