Shot almost entirely inside their car, Pike and Rhys play a splintering couple trying to save their terrified teenager

How encouraging that whatever state our film industry is considered to be in, it can still find space for a crackingly good script from a supersmart, disciplined first-timer who’s clearly been working on it for a while, planing down the edges and trimming away the fat through successive drafts. Hallow Road is the kind of property that often emerges after a spell on Hollywood’s “Black List” of much admired but as yet unproduced screenplays. It is a gripping, real-time suspense thriller with a twist of the macabre, a film about family guilt and the return of the repressed, written by National Film and Television School graduate William Gillies, a scary-movie enthusiast who here makes his feature script debut. British-Iranian film-maker Babak Anvari directs and Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike give forthright,...