Locked
David Yarokvesky’s “Locked” is a solid showcase for the underrated range of Bill Skarsgård, who can slide from a moody creature like his character in “Nosferatu” to a panicked, one-man show like this one with ease. And that’s about it. As good as Skarsgård is here, he gets stuck in a movie that has no idea what to do with him or its concept, repeating the same shallow themes and scenes of torture before lurching to an unsatisfying conclusion. “Locked” starts promisingly, and then almost refuses to really go anywhere, trapped by its own concept and unwillingness to do anything thematically richer than “wealthy people be crazy.”
Eddie (Skarsgård) is the kind of low-level criminal who just needs one more good job to get himself free of his past to live his future with his daughter. There’s a far more daring version of “Locked” that presents an Eddie who’s a true bad guy and then forces us to ask if what happens to him is a form of karma, but this isn’t that movie. This one isn’t even risky enough to let Eddie’s inciting incident be an actual break-in. When Eddie spots a luxury SUV in a remote parking lot, he decides to see if the door is unlocked, and it is. After looking around the car, he tries to leave, only to find he is now a prisoner of this impressive ride. The windows are tinted so he can’t signal for help, and something is stopping his phone from calling out. And then things get weird.
As Eddie is trying to escape, he hears the voice of a man named William (Anthony Hopkins, mostly literally phoning this one in). His captor remains depressingly vague about what he wants from Eddie—he’s more of a whiny man-child than a Jigsaw-esque mastermind—as he tortures our protagonist for the majority of the movie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many scenes of someone being tased—every time that Eddie talks back or even swears, he gets electrocuted by the car—and William is also able to play with the temperature in the automobile, first freezing and then sweating out poor Eddie. By the time that Eddie was considering drinking his own pee to stave off dehydration, I was about done with the torture.
Why is William doing this to a hapless stranger who happened to break into his car? He reveals that he’s in the end stages of a cancer diagnosis and that his daughter was recently killed by street criminals. He’s decided to become vigilante in his final days, as if that can provide some closure. The most interesting thing about William is how much Hopkins and writer Michael Arlen Ross are willing to drain him of anything approaching empathy. Some films would have softened William as a way to understand how trauma can lead people to become someone that their old self wouldn’t recognize, but William is just a monster. He has no sympathy for Eddie and seems to enjoy torturing him.
As fun as “Locked” may be for William, the same isn’t true for viewers. It’s a film that seems notably slight on ideas. Every time it flirts with commentary on haves torturing have-nots or how empathy is in short supply when it comes to the treatment of criminals in our society, it pulls away to another torture sequence. Even that stuff feels inert in that Eddie doesn’t have enough control in this situation to make it a true battle of wills. We know Eddie will escape because this is never a bleak enough movie to suggest otherwise, and that drains “Locked” of actual tension. This kind of film lives and dies on the journey instead of the destination, and this one just made me feel trapped.
