What does it mean to guide a child into adulthood? Is parenting about keeping your children safe from the world, or equipping them to face it? At what point does protection become control, and when does love cross into fear?

These questions are the emotional stakes threaded through every breath, glance and desperate phone call in Babak Anvari’s eerie, tightly wound thriller. Predominantly set during a car ride with a premise that unfolds in real time, this 80-minute descent into panic offers something rare: a moral dilemma wrapped in genre skin, where the scariest questions are the ones we ask ourselves.

We open with a slow glide through a dim, silent home. The remnants of a fight linger in the details: a broken glass swept halfway into a dustpan, dishes abandoned mid-meal. The stillness is broken by a ringing phone. Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) answer to find their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell, heard but never seen) on the line. She’s sobbing, terrified. She left in anger after a fight, drove into the woods, and thinks she’s hit someone with her car.

What follows is a real-time race to the scene - and a psychological spiral inward. Maddie, a paramedic, snaps into crisis mode, coaching her daughter through CPR with a barely concealed tremor of dread. (Her choice of timing - 'Nellie the Elephant', not 'Staying Alive' - adds a jarring touch of the absurd to the moment.) Frank, meanwhile, is more vulnerable and infantilising to Alice, panicking himself and wanting to protect her from the trauma of trying to resuscitate a dying girl – and the consequences that may follow.

Their reactions are instinctive, even noble in intent. But they begin to chip at something deeper: how much of their parenting has been about preparing Alice for the world, and how much has been about shielding her from it?

The power of Hallow Road lies in how thoroughly Pike and Rhys inhabit these roles. Pike plays Maddie with a flinty calm that only just conceals her unravelling. She doesn’t monologue or break down in a storm of emotion - her strength is in restraint. Every instruction she gives Alice is weighted with years of practiced competence battling a mother’s helplessness. When she finally cracks, it’s not a collapse, but a falter. A human moment, devastating in its smallness.

Rhys, by contrast, leans into Frank’s barely suppressed panic. His desire to do something manifests in half-baked plans and emotional overreaches. He’s the kind of father who tries to fix what can’t be fixed, whose love is wrapped in layers of guilt and fear. Their dynamic - brittle, bruised, and believable - anchors the film even as the story begins to shift into stranger territory.

Because Hallow Road is not just a domestic drama. It begins that way, with echoes of Locke in its real-time structure and single-location intensity. But Anvari has other intentions. As the couple drive deeper into the forest, something else enters the frame - a tone of creeping otherness, of moral reckoning.

At one point, an unknown voice comes over the phone. It's not the police. It's not Alice. It's... something else. Not exactly supernatural, but disorienting. The voice is cold, precise, unsettlingly familiar. Speaking to Maddie and Frank, it needles into the grey spaces between their choices, speaking with the kind of quiet authority that makes you question whether you’re being judged... or simply being seen in way you don’t want to be.

The tonal shift is jarring, but purposeful. The film moves from realism to parable, from crisis to something more metaphysical. It is not interested in courtroom consequences, but moral ones. It wants to know what kind of people Maddie and Frank are - and what kind of child they’ve raised.

The use of Alice as an unseen presence is a brilliant choice. We hear her and fear for her, but we never see her. Her voice becomes a test. It’s as though the car has become a confessional booth, or a purgatory. Outside, a dying girl waits. Inside, two parents argue about what’s right, what’s forgivable, what’s still possible.

Kit Fraser’s cinematography makes striking use of the limited space, turning dashboard lights and reflections into emotional cues. The car becomes a floating capsule, removed from the world - until it isn't. Laura Jennings’ editing is equally precise, keeping the rhythm tight even as reality begins to slip sideways.

Yes, the final act stretches plausibility. And yes, the film’s twist - revealed subtly, even subliminally in its closing moments - may frustrate those expecting a more conventional resolution. But Hallow Road is not a film about answers. It’s about fear. Specifically, the fear of failing your child - not through neglect, but through too much love, too many interventions, too many lies told in their name.

By the time the credits roll, you may find yourself revisiting every choice the characters made, questioning not just their morality, but your own. Would you lie for your child? Would you let them suffer if it meant they might grow? Would you know when to let go?

Films this compact rarely leave such a wide emotional footprint. Hallow Road may be set almost entirely inside a moving car, but it opens up something vast - the dark forest of modern parenting, where the paths of protection and responsibility blur into one another.

Hallow Road isn’t just a thriller. It’s a mirror. Many parents might be unnerved by what they see reflected back.

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: