I almost didn't go see Locke. I skipped the Sundance screening because the premise - Tom Hardy is in a car talking on a speakerphone the whole time solving a crisis - made it sound so gimmicky. And the title made me think it was going to be some kind of crime/spy thing where he's driving to save or kill someone and where all the phone calls were going to be exposition-laced bits of silliness. When I finally saw a press screening in LA I was blown away; Locke was nothing like what I had expected. The conflict is minor and personal, the stakes are not life and death. The phone calls are all present and real. And Tom Hardy is amazing.

The film came and sort of went, and I'm not sure why. Every day that passes makes me think that Locke might be a great minor film, a movie that we keep coming back to for years. Writer/director Steven Knight has made a truly compelling, edge of your seat movie about a guy sitting in a car for two hours. It's a gimmick concept, but for me it's a gimmick concept that works. Ivan Locke gets into his car and drives away from one life - a life with a family and a big-time job supervising concrete pours for major skyscrapers - towards a new one, one he doesn't want but that he feels he must accept because of his personal ethics.

And that's it. There are no hostages or keycodes or arms deals. He spends time on the phone with his wife and son, trying to break it to them that while he loves them, and while he wants to come home, he first must deal with a problem he has created. He spends time on the phone with his assistant at the worksite; they're about to undertake the largest pour of concrete in European history and Locke has left them on their own. He walks the man through every step, pontificating on the very nature of concrete and construction.

It sounds boring. It isn't. Knight's script gives Hardy, using a Welsh accent, plenty of beautiful words to roll around his tongue, and lets him speak in a flowery, almost grandiloquent style. He monologues about the pending concrete pour and about the impact of the skyscraper they will build, how they intend to steal a piece of the sky itself. Nobody really talks like this, and that's too bad, because Locke's words imbue his every thought and his seemingly mundane job with an epic quality of heroism and meaning. Knight shows us Locke as hyper-competent - he has every detail in his head and can walk his assistant through every step of the process - until he suddenly isn't. Hardy delivers his every word with precision, enunciating every syllable with scientific clarity, defining the character just through speech. The movie holds back the reveal of what mistake Locke has made that forces him to drive away until it has established the man's competence and self-discipline. That mistake is, in a way, very mundane but it hits as hard as a thriller twist because of how alive this character has become.

Hardy is a monster; too often we expect great performances to be filled with histrionics and over the top emotion. In Locke he is trapped in position, seated behind the wheel of his car for the entire movie, sealed in concrete. But that doesn't hold him back, and Hardy has at his disposal the entire gamut of human emotion, and he runs through them like a master pianist playing scales. The movie is more or less real time, and he goes from pride to sorrow to anger to regret to love with the kind of precision that would make Locke proud. It's a performance that deserves an Oscar, but in a movie so small it has no chance of being recognized. It's the opposite of Ryan Reynolds in Buried, a movie to which Locke has been compared (due to the one actor, single setting, phone call premise), but which has none of Locke's subtlety. Reynolds' performance, fine for a Hollywood face, comes across as hysterical and broad compared to Hardy; it's like looking at the mugging of a silent movie star versus modern naturalism.

There are many complaints about the state of cinema today, that there are no films being made for adults. And yet here's Locke, a movie that is about human level dilemmas and that is focused on a special and enthralling performance, that requires no special effects and could, in fact, be performed on stage. It's a thriller without any traditional 'thrills,' but it's more gripping and exciting than most action movies you'll see. Somehow the media punditry is full of complaints about superhero movies and blockbusters when Locke is sitting right under their noses; instead of complaining about the bad movies, take the time to celebrate the good ones. Locke is an extraordinary little film, one of the year's best and it has that quality so few films have - it grows on you, it lives with you, it keeps coming back around to the front of your mind. It has an immediate impact - the whole thing is incredible, both technically and emotionally - but the act of watching Locke is sort of like pouring a concrete foundation. It's where you're going to build towering thoughts in the weeks and months to come as you keep revisiting the movie in your head.

Locke is on home video and is available to rent via streaming services. If you missed the film in its limited theatrical run, I cannot recommend it highy enough now.