Bill Skarsgård Crashes Out in Fun, Grim Social Thriller ‘Locked’ [Review]
David Yarovesky’s (Brightburn, Nightbooks) Locked is generational conflict as casual dining. Not fast food—it’s more filling and delectable than that—but a solid tray’s worth of overpriced sandwiches and soup that at times belie their origins. That sounds harsh, though that isn’t the intent. Locked, a remake of the Argentinian film 4×4, is thriller trash and knows it, but that doesn’t stop the film from aspiring to a few surprising and incisive bits of commentary among the bloodshed.
Bill Skarsgård’s Eddie is having a conventional thriller movie cinematic rut. He cannot afford to get his car out of the shop. His ex-girlfriend and mother to his daughter regularly harangues him on the phone. He gets that standard final chance—also seen in last year’s Amber Alert—to either shape up or risk being out of his daughter’s life forever. What’s a mid-30s down-and-out dude supposed to do? Get highlights and do crime, that’s what.
Eddie desperately tries to pull together the money needed to get his life back on track, ultimately conceding to scouting parked cars for a quick hit. Eventually, he arrives at William’s (Anthony Hopkins, principally in a voiceover role) luxury smart SUV, a Dolus model, Latin for deception. Get it? Eddie breaks in, finds nothing beyond a sick pair of sunnies, and decides to leave. Unfortunately for him, he’s been titularly Locked in, inciting a claustrophobic chamber piece reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth.
There’s an undercurrent of indifference that regularly elevates the gruesome set pieces. While visually on the nose, it’s no doubt affecting to see Eddie’s dire circumstances juxtaposed against a city of sky-high penthouses and luxury vehicles haphazardly parked around. Inside the vehicle, Eddie scrambles in survival fashion as William phones in to taunt him. There are threads of Don’t Breathe and Bad Samaritan, with Locked centering down-and-out punks and their petty criminality compared to broader, societal systems. Make no mistake, William is objectively the villain, and Locked barely (luckily) indicts Eddie for his misdemeanor B&E.
There’s more going on in Locked beyond Bill Skarsgård taking his shirt off, crashing out, and drinking his own piss, however. His vape dies in the second act, so you can’t exactly blame him. William’s calls are regularly philosophical, long-form expository dialogues and debates on the nature of law and order, crime and punishment (even explicitly name-dropped at one point). Younger generations have violated the social contract, and the architecture of the judicial system spreads their recidivist ways by dumping dangerous criminals back onto the street.
It’s at times a bit too elevated for a movie featuring ricocheting bullets and leather-clad SUV tasers, though Skarsgård is fully committed to the role of audience mouthpiece, clapping back at William’s conservative politics with all the intensity you might hope. It’s rarely subtle, with lines of dialogue explicitly referencing 2014 buzzwords such as “triggered” and “canceled.” But this is also a movie that features some up-close body horror, so perhaps subtlety isn’t the point.
The car does get moving at one point, amping up the intensity and piling up a body count. It’s at that point that Locked becomes less a diversion and more a kind of mean-spirited reel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but later violence hits hard with its broader implications for the world and its reflections of a system we know too well—it’s hard to celebrate gnarly deaths when they’re so politically loaded.
It’s there that Locked’s anti-boomer screed finds itself wedged between the center console of a B-movie and the seat of a social thriller. It’s fun, silly, and reasonably insightful, until it’s suddenly not, swerving into serious territory that suffocates some of the sillier Sam Raimi (who produced) thrills. Locked is still worth checking out, if only to see one of this generation’s best and weirdest performers single-handedly crash out against a capitalistic culture of indifference. Never change, Bill Skarsgård, though maybe confirm whether the next car you break into belongs to a two-time Oscar winner or not.
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Locked
Summary
Locked is a diverting social thriller with enough blood and guts (and theatrics) to render it a ride worth taking.
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