LOCKE is a tour de force for actor Tom Hardy. The other actors in the film only appear as voices on a car phone. Hardy plays construction manager Ivan Locke. He is set to supervise a massive concrete pour that will lay the foundations for a new skyscraper the next morning. Instead, he is sitting in his car and driving to London where a woman with whom he had a one-night stand a few months back, is about to have his baby. Locke has to solve his problems on the phone: give instructions to his second in command, straighten things out with his boss, check on roadblocks, explain things to his wife and family, and calm down the lonely woman in London about to give birth 2 months premature to his child. Locke is a man who just wants to do the right thing, mainly because his own deadbeat Dad abandoned him as a child. Tom Hardy plays Locke as a man who masters his emotions with “manly” control. The story with his job is slightly contrived and the depiction of women in Locke’s life is actually quite sexist. They are simple-minded troublemakers and the world would be better off without them. What’s interesting about LOCKE is something else. In literature or in film when the world falls apart for solid men, there is the illusion that the world is as solid as they are. In the end they come across as pathetic. This film is different. Locke knows how fragile things can be. This fine film of cinematic minimalism nicely shows Locke’s efforts at keeping things together.

Tom Dorow