Knight: Locke (2013)

Over the last few years, film has turned towards hard infrastructure as an elegiac approximation for an analog, empiricist world that feels well and truly behind us. In many ways, Locke feels like a culmination of that tendency. Shot in its entirety in a moving car, and anchored by a solo performance by Tom Hardy, it’s about Ivan Locke, a Welsh construction manager who takes a detour on his way home from work one night, with nothing but his SmartPhone and GPS for company. What that detour involves is perhaps best left for the film’s many phone conversations to explain, but it leads to Locke taking a respite from his job just when he is needed to supervise the biggest concrete pour in European history. As a result, he spends a great deal of the drive relaying instructions remotely, to a plethora of builders, overseers and concrete farmers, with increasing irritation at their inability to handle simple specifications. Yet the more tangible Locke’s directives become, the more intangible his communicative channels seem – with every fresh effort he makes to co-ordinate this new monolith of hard infrastructure, the technology supporting and sustaining him seems softer and softer, more and more incorporeal. Among other things, that continually, imperceptibly fuses the car with both the highway and the camera, as well as displacing the pulse and momentum of Locke’s own journey, which disperses its destination as it proceeds. By the end, the car is more a social media platform than a mode of transportation, set adrift in an archipelago of light that is perhaps truer to the nightscapes of Johnny Jewel and Chromatics than Drive, or the Drive soundtrack - as in some of Jewel’s most haunting moments, it feels as if the carscape has expanded to the point where it has simply reincorporated all the vast loneliness outside, internalised even the most desolate and panoramic of sightlines. In another time, it might have ended with a twist – perhaps Locke would simply be driving in a circle, or there wouldn’t really be anyone there on the other end of the phone line. But that all seems curiously irrelevant here, too definite or emphatic for a film that bleeds back into the world so subtly and subliminally that you barely even notice when it finishes.