Locke
It has been a busy year for writer/director Steven Knight. Besides his British television series Peaky Blinders, he wrote the screenplays for both The Hundred-Foot Journey and TIFF premiere Pawn Sacrifice. However, his crowning achievement was his sophomore feature, Locke, a taut, absorbing one-man show starring Tom Hardy as a man going on the worst drive of his life.
Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a calm construction site director catching up on many phone calls over an 80-minute drive to London. Not only is he about to lay one of the biggest cement pours in history, but Bethan, a woman with whom he had an affair with, is about to give birth to his child. He yearns to be by her bedside, but Locke has not yet told his wife about this affair. (The rest of the cast, including Broadchurch’s Olivia Colman and The Affair’s Ruth Wilson, do not appear. Their voices over his BMW’s Bluetooth suffice.)
Knight contains the action to the driver’s seat of Locke’s SUV and the camera bumps and swerves to match the sensation the character feels. The suspense ratchets when we come to realize that, as passengers, how the car moves is out of our control. Locke accelerates along with the character, while Knight’s screenplay escalates the level of conflict on the various challenges that Locke faces – ones he must solve from the comfort of his driver’s seat.
Locke’s occupation is a sly metaphor considering how the cracks are beginning to show on his solid life. Hardy is disarming in the role, trapped within the limits of one location and forced to manage various emotions at once, while never overselling his expressions. Through volume and tone, Hardy shows just how deep a performance one can bring. He almost never takes his eyes off the road, and it is hard to take your eyes off him.
For more on this incredible film, check out our interview with Hardy and Knight below.