Title: Locked
Director: David Yarovesky
Cast: Bill Skarsgard, Anthony Hopkins
Where: In theatres near you
Rating: 3 Stars
Few things are more poetic than a thief trapped in his own crime scene. Locked sets out to explore that irony with a high-concept premise: a petty crook breaks into an SUV, only to realize that the car has no intention of letting him go. What begins as a sleek, claustrophobic thriller soon finds itself stalling, caught between its ambitions and the limitations of its single-location setting.
Bill Skarsgård, as Eddie Barrish, is the film’s engine, propelling the narrative with a performance that oscillates between frantic desperation and steely resolve. Eddie isn’t a hardened criminal—just a man looking for an easy way out. His latest scheme lands him in the worst predicament: locked inside a high-tech vehicle designed by someone with a grudge and a disturbingly creative sense of retribution. That someone is William (Anthony Hopkins), an unseen tormentor who watches, waits, and delivers chilling threats through the car’s speakers. It’s less Fast & Furious, and more Saw in a Lexus showroom.
Director David Yarovesky keeps the tension dialed up in the film’s early stretches, playing up the sheer helplessness of Eddie’s situation. The car, a sleek, eerily impersonal machine, becomes both prison and execution chamber—its climate control a weapon, its upholstery a trap, its doors a taunt. For a while, the film thrives on this unsettling setup, inviting the audience to squirm alongside its protagonist. Skarsgård, whose face does much of the heavy lifting, makes us feel every ounce of Eddie’s growing panic.
And then, just as the narrative seems poised to rev into something truly gripping, it begins to sputter. The script, written by Michael Arlen Ross, struggles to sustain the tension over its 95-minute runtime. What starts as a clever cat-and-mouse game soon turns repetitive, circling the same beats with diminishing returns. Eddie outsmarts the car. The car retaliates. William delivers another cryptic monologue. Rinse, repeat. The telling lacks the ingenuity to sustain its premise, and Eddie’s suffering becomes less an edge-of-your-seat ordeal and more an endurance test.
Then there is Hopkins, who is largely relegated, to voiceover duty for most of the film. His presence is meant, to add gravitas, but it is hard not to feel shortchanged when an actor of his calibre is reduced to a disembodied menace on a speakerphone. By the time he physically appears, the film has already exhausted much of its suspense, leaving his performance feeling more like an afterthought than a climactic reveal.
Visually, Locked makes the most of its confined space. Cinematographer Michael Dallatorre finds interesting angles and plays with lighting to keep the environment dynamic, but no amount of stylistic flourishes can fully compensate for the script’s lack of momentum. By the end, the film starts resembling a darkly comedic infomercial for dystopian car security rather than a grounded thriller.
Overall, for all its glossy packaging by the time the film ends, it is hard not to feel like we have been taken for a ride we didn’t need to take.