The Daily Stream: ‘Locke’ Is 85 Minutes Of Tom Hardy Alone In A Car, And It Is A Transformative Experience
By Jeremy Mathai/July 16, 2021 1:03 pm EST
The rest of the film plays out under the lonesome, sickly-colored lights of various highways in an exercise that puts our perception to the test. Alternating between Locke putting out fires among his construction team as they scramble to deal with his absence and his attempts to explain himself to his uncomprehending wife and son, these speaker phone conversations prove to be far more gripping than you might assume. Like an unnoticed onlooker to a slow motion car crash, we’re privy to hearing the pained and oftentimes confused responses on the other end of the line…but all we ever see is Tom Hardy’s impeccably nuanced facial reactions, observing his resolve ebbing and flowing between stubborn conviction and heartbreaking helplessness. This comes into particularly sharp relief when Locke begins having monologues with himself as well as voices from his past, making the claustrophobic car feel even smaller and more constrained.
Stripped down to the barest essentials of a narrative, it’s almost as if the human drama surges into the void and compensates for any of the distractions we’re normally used to.
Locke is essentially about an imperfect man caught between impossible forces tugging him in wildly different directions: loyalty, honor, and responsibility. He’s made mistakes in his past — he knows he might be making another one right now! — but what if the road to redemption requires making even more costly sacrifices along the way? This isn’t a heightened world with matters of life or death hanging in the balance. On the contrary, Locke finds himself in the midst of an almost maddeningly ordinary situation; one that nonetheless requires a life-changing choice. And that’s precisely what makes the stakes of this small, self-contained story feel so unimaginably large.
Other than the possible exception of Hardy’s sometimes flowery dialogue (who, by the way, has never been better than he is here) and the pulsing soundtrack, Locke isn’t flashy or attention-grabbing in any conventional sense. All we have is a man, a car, and his voice to keep us company as we’re taken on a ride through a character’s personal dark night of the soul. This film has a way of sticking with you, to the point that you may never look at a lonely drive in the middle of the night the same way again. As it turns out, we’re all just one car ride away from going from who we are now to who we might become.
