Locked

There is something irresistibly primitive about a cinematic battle that takes place in a confined space, and David Yarovesky's Locked seizes this concept with both hands and exploits it to the last drop of tension and commentary. In this highly conceptual remake of the 2019 Argentine thriller 4x4, screenwriter Michael Arlen Ross takes a seemingly simple premise—a thief trapped in a luxury SUV equipped with technological weapons—and turns it into a claustrophobic reflection on power, social class, justice, and the cruel games people play when they confuse privilege with virtue. Like its protagonist, the film never has much room to breathe, but it uses this constraint to deliver an intense and unsettling experience, closer to a psychological torture chamber than a traditional thriller. And while Locked sometimes loses momentum in its somewhat heavy philosophical digressions, it remains a perfectly constructed showcase for two performances that push the boundaries of human decency: Eddie, played viscerally by Bill Skarsgård, and William, voiced throughout most of the film by Anthony Hopkins, a man whose disembodied presence seems larger than life.

At its core, Locked is a brutal chamber piece for two actors, a vehicle and a moral maze. Eddie Barrish, played with a disturbing mix of fragility and fierceness by Bill Skarsgård, is not an archetype we haven't seen before: a broke and desperate father trying to scrape together a few hundred dollars to get his truck back from a mechanic so he can keep working and stay in his daughter's life. It's the kind of cascading misfortune that seems almost orchestrated by fate, but Bill Skarsgård ensures that Eddie never becomes pitiful. On the contrary, he is rough and unpredictable, a product of a broken system and personal flaws, as impulsive as he is endearing. His initial decision to steal a luxury SUV seems more like a last-minute improvisation than a premeditated crime. What he doesn't realize is that he hasn't just stolen a car, but entered a purgatory meticulously designed by a man who has more money than empathy and thinks he's God. That man is William (Anthony Hopkins), a wealthy, grieving man whose daughter was murdered and who now uses his fortune to trap petty criminals in elaborate moralistic traps. You could say that William is less a man than an embodied, or rather vocalized, projection of America's obsession with incarceration.

Although he is physically absent for most of the film, Anthony Hopkins dominates the interior of the SUV with his voice alone, and it is a testament to his talent that we are hanging on his every syllable. His performance is deceptively understated, tinged with contempt and deadpan humor, as he delivers cruel philosophical monologues that resemble poorly crafted TED talks filtered through Ayn Rand and a dash of vigilante fan fiction. He pities the poor but despises their actions, justifies violence as a form of correction, and considers empathy a weakness. The danger isn't that his arguments are convincing, but that he believes them deeply. What's terrifying isn't his power, but his conviction that he's right. The fact that we never know whether he's watching Eddie from a nearby surveillance van or from a mansion in the hills only adds to the unease. It's capitalism turned into predator-prey entertainment, a one-sided game of moral whack-a-mole disguised as tough love rhetoric.

What sets Locked apart from a simple moral torture film, even though it clearly flirts with the genre, is its ability to make the SUV itself a dynamic character. David Yarovesky and cinematographer Michael Dallatorre treat the car as both a stage and an antagonist, using its surveillance cameras, harsh yellow interior lighting, and changing weather conditions to suggest not only a physical trap, but also a psychological one. The fact that the car manufacturer is called “Dolus” — which means “deception” in Latin — seems like the kind of ironic symbolism you'd expect from a dystopian satire. Yet somehow, the film makes this absurd world plausible, even familiar. Who hasn't felt judged by an algorithm or trapped in a system that punishes them for trying to survive? When Eddie tries to call for help and realizes that the SUV is soundproofed and the windows are tinted, it's not just a clever narrative device, but a poignant metaphor for the isolation of poverty and the invisibility of those who live on the margins of the social safety net.

That said, the central conflict of the film isn't just a physical struggle between man and machine, but also an ideological battle between two broken men with irreconcilable worldviews. Eddie believes the system is rigged against him—and he's not wrong—while William believes that order must be restored through suffering. Their conversations, relayed through a Bluetooth system that serves as both a confessional and an instrument of electric torture, oscillate between concrete grievances and bombastic sermons. At best, these exchanges have the crackling energy of a two-person play; at worst, they border on didacticism, as if the filmmakers feared that the audience wouldn't understand the subtext unless it was spelled out in a long speech about individual responsibility and generational decline. Yet even when the dialogue descends into cliché, Bill Skarsgård anchors the film in sweat and despair, crawling, struggling, and clawing at the inside of the car like a man possessed. While Eddie's transformation from an unambitious thug to a determined survivor seems a little too smooth, it is made believable by the raw power of Bill Skarsgård's performance.

Visually, Locked manages to remain dynamic despite its single location, thanks to David Yarovesky's talent for inventive compositions and manipulation of space. One particularly striking sequence shows condensation dripping down the windows like sweat, subtly merging Eddie's physical suffering with the stifling atmosphere of his prison. At another point, the transition to fisheye-lens CCTV footage evokes a disturbing voyeurism: William isn't just punishing Eddie, he's watching him, cataloguing him, taking pleasure in controlling him. The soundtrack, composed by Tim Williams, is tense, and even if the narrative sometimes falls into repetition (more sermons, more tasers, more temperature fluctuations), the pace never really slows down. There is even a kind of black humor that emerges unexpectedly: at one point, Eddie is rewarded with a cookie for good behavior. It's absurd, pathetic, Orwellian, and it hits with brutal irony.

What elevates Locked above the clichés of its genre is its refusal to offer easy catharsis. There is no grand moral redemption for William, and Eddie's journey, while redemptive, is tinged with ambiguity. Has he learned a lesson or simply endured trauma? Is survival proof of moral evolution or just a stroke of luck? The film suggests answers but offers none, and that is precisely the point. If Saw posits that suffering purifies, Locked responds that it merely clarifies things—what we do with that clarity is up to us. And therein lies its most disturbing insight: that justice, in the wrong hands, is indistinguishable from cruelty, and that the line between punishment and performance is dangerously thin.

Locked may be a remake, but it is above all a rare example of a successful remake, taking the fundamental elements of the original concept and wrapping them in contemporary anxieties and heavy themes. It's an elegant and brutal parable about the age of surveillance, wealth inequality, and algorithmic judgment, disguised as a popcorn thriller but quietly bubbling with social commentary. The film doesn't always hit the mark, but it hits hard and often, and sometimes that's what makes all the difference.

Locked
Directed by David Yarovesky
Written by Michael Arlen Ross
Based on 4x4 by Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat
Produced by Ara Keshishian, Petr Jákl, Zainab Azizi, Sam Raimi, Sean Patrick O'Reilly
Starring Bill Skarsgård, Anthony Hopkins
Cinematography: Michael Dallatorre
Edited by Andrew Buckland, Peter Gvozdas
Music by Timothy Williams
Production companies: ZQ Entertainment, Raimi Productions
Distributed by The Avenue (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release date: March 21, 2025 (United States), April 9, 2025 (France)
Running time: 95 minutes

Seen on April 16, 2025 at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 5, seat C18

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