Crew
Director – David Yarovesky, Screenplay – Michael Arlen Ross, Based on the Film 4×4 (2019) Written by Mariano Cohn & Gaston Duprat, Producers – Zainab Azizi, Petr Jakl, Ara Keshishian, Sean Patrick O’Reilly & Sam Raimi, Photography – Michael Dallatorre, Music – Tim Williams, Visual Effects Supervisor – Bob Habros, Visual Effects – PFX (Supervisor – Jindrich Cervenka), Special Effects Supervisor – James Paradis, Makeup Effects – MasterFX Inc., Production Design – Grant Armstrong. Production Company – Arcana Studios/ZQ Entertainment/R Productions/Sillen Productions/Bondit Media Capital/Exemplary Productions/Magic Button Films/Blue Rider Media/Longevity Pictures.
Cast
Bill Skarsgård (Eddie Parrish), Anthony Hopkins (William), Ashley Cartwright (Sarah), Michael Eklund (Karl)
Plot
Eddie Parrish is down on his luck, lacking the money to get his van back from the repair shop to pick up his daughter. He wanders the streets, seeking a solution. He then comes across an SUV sitting in an empty lot and finds it unlocked. He gets in, looking for anything he can steal – only to then find the doors are locked and he is unable to get out. The car’s phone comes to life. It is the owner William who explains he has had the vehicle rebuilt because he was tired of it being broken into. The SUV is surrounded by bulletproof metal and windows and seats that shock Eddie whenever he annoys William. William keeps Eddie a prisoner in the vehicle, determined to make him face the consequence of his criminal actions.
4×4 (2019) was an Argentinean-made film with the premise of a man trapped inside a SUV. It proved to be a quite a reasonable success when it came out and played at a number of international film festivals. The film’s profile saw it being remade – 2022 saw both Brazilian and Telugu remakes of the same premise, followed by Locked here, an English-language version.
Locked is directed by David Yarovesky, known for other genre films such as The Hive (2014), Brightburn (2019) and Nightbooks (2021). The film comes produced by Sam Raimi, among others. The film is principally produced by Canadian-based animator/comic-book artists Sean Patrick O’Reilly who made the Howard Lovecraft animated films and then branched out into live-action films with Corrective Measures (2022). The film was shot in Vancouver – most of the locations that Bill Skarsgård passes through in the early scenes and where the vehicle is parked are the Downtown Eastside, aka ‘Canada’s Worst Neighbourhood.’
Locked reminds of the basic set-up of Buried (2010), which had Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin for the duration, or perhaps even more so Phone Booth (2002) where Colin Farrell was trapped in a phone booth by a sniper and made to face consequences of his actions. There is the near-identical set-up here where Bill Skarsgård is trapped inside an SUV rather than a coffin or a phone booth for the running time. Buried and Phone Booth spawned a number of copies that seemed to be competing to confine their protagonists in as small a space as possible.
Vehicular imprisonment was also conducted in other films like Detour (2013) and Curve (2015) featuring characters trapped in overturned SUVs, while Trunk (2023) and The Girl in the Trunk (2024) concern women abducted and imprisoned in a car trunk, and Shuttle (2008) has its protagonists held hostage in an airport shuttle bus.
With high profile names like Bill Skarsgård as the lead and Anthony Hopkins in a villain role, you expected good things of Locked but it plays by familiar cliches most of the way. There is the odd amusement – Hopkins tortures Skarsgård at one point by turning up the air conditioning and playing polka music out of the stereo system non-stop. But none of it ever hits the paranoid or claustrophobic tension that Buried and other better entries among the Imprisonment Thrillers do.
Locked is also the rare example of an economic horror film. Bill Skarsgård is motivated by just getting enough money to get his van back from the shop. On the other side of the coin, Anthony Hopkins is a successful surgeon who is enacting revenge against thieves for breaking into his van and sits in his lofty apartment looking down and torturing Bill Skarsgård, while making dismissive comments about how he managed to lift himself up and become a success and not being able to see why anybody else could not. The film never quite digs into the moral complexities of a wealthy man essentially paying to torture a poor person for his own amusement or whether Bill Skarsgård was justified in stealing to meet basic needs. The film reaches a fairly predictable cliché ending where Bill Skarsgård travels the arc of a redeemable loser and is forgiven for finally turning up to pick up his daughter.
Trailer here