Locke

If the close-up is cinema’s most powerful tool, not to be overused, tell director Steven Knight, who focuses intently of the face of Tom Hardy in this thrilling single person piece. Also tell Atom Egoyan, who in similar fashion projected a 30 minute single take of the great Michael Gambon’s crumbling features for Eh Joe on the Edinburgh stage last year. It’s only right to compare Locke to theatre in style, and absolutely necessary to compare it more specifically to Beckett, from which it takes so much (even dropping a Waiting for Godot reference).

While the great playwright was haunted by the past, Hardy’s Ivan Locke is by the present. Sealed in the modern isolation of his BMW, speeding down the M9, but as distant as Sandra Bullock in Gravity’s space pod, he navigates domestic and professional situations that take on herculean significance. While Beckett's Krapp endured his own folly through worn out, aged tapes, Locke is tormented by the present through his continually engaged car phone, his single link to the outside world.

You could absorb this film almost fully with your eyes shut, but Knight adds the visual stimulation of ghostly reflections of Locke, artificially lit by headlights, like a more mundane version of Drive's opening scene. This does not quite share the subtlety of Beckett (metaphors of hardening concrete footprints are a little too obvious), or the poetry of language, but must be considered a modern equivalent. [Alan Bett]