If Locke is a trick, it’s one with expert sleight of hand. It takes place (almost) entirely within the tight confines of a BMW, featuring a man in crisis with only a cell phone to fix it. The small space does nothing to hold Locke back; it's riveting. There’s a library of films that study how to make stories out of cramped spaces and isolated rooms, exemplified by such authors as Alfred Hitchcock with Rope and Lifeboat, Akira Kurosawa with High and Low, and Sidney Lumet with 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon. There are benefits to the single-space experience: it isn’t hard to make a film feel claustrophobic when the setting is doing that for you on its own. When you bottle an audience into an enclosed location, eventually the bottle is gunna pop. It’s the filmmaker’s job to make a visual story out of a set space, something Kurosawa mastered in High and Low with elaborate long-take sequences that feature many different compositions without ever cutting. That technique ties the emotional arc of the characters to the visual, which also staves off the greatest risk with films in this quirky sub-genre: boredom. Without expert direction and a fine cast, the single-space film can easily feel like the doctor’s waiting room of cinema. But writer and director Steven Knight knows movies. Locke is ceaselessly compelling and never less than fascinating.

Opening in a construction site in what are the film’s only minutes outside of a car, Locke is a film that happens nearly in real time. Orson Welles, who was keenly interested in temporal and physical reality in his masterstroke Citizen Kane, would applaud Knight for executing such a tightly wound story in an equally tight space. The main character is Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), a Welsh-accented top-tier construction man leaving for home after a late night at work. We learn he stayed in preparation for tomorrow’s big concrete pour, the details of which become increasingly revealed as the film continues. We see him go through a set of actions we infer to be routine. He methodically takes off his grimy work clothes before getting into his luxury car, he pulls out, and he drives. As he approaches an intersection—one he has surely faced many nights driving home from work—he switches on his left turn signal without giving it a thought, an unconscious act of muscle memory the way any of us driving home would do. But something changes. The second he flips on the turn signal, it’s as though somebody lit a match inside him, and it only takes seconds before becoming a roaring fire. He realizes he has to change direction. He puts on his right turn signal and takes off in the other direction, setting forward a chain reaction that might cost him everything he has in life. Why? He’s trying to do the right thing. And here’s the rub: the only way he can save himself and those around him is through his cell phone.

I won’t say how or what. Locke doesn’t have the exposition of a normal film, and instead of going through the typical plot checkmarks in the first act, the film revels in revealing its secrets. In a conventional film, these would be simple truths of its premise, but Locke turns each of them into small revelations. These secrets are periodically given to the audience, and I won’t rob the film, or my readers who haven’t seen it, of how it is meant to be experienced. It’s for this reason that the trailers exempt any plot details beyond the summary above. Locke is all about the becoming complicit in its multilayered construction (no pun intended). It’s lean, fast, and shamelessly manipulative.

The design is both a study in cinema and in stylistics. Locke shares as much with Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theater as it does Hitchcock. Instead of relying on the complex in-shot changing compositions of Kurosawa, Knight uses light and the line as abstract shapes pushing Tom Hardy’s dazzling performance into intense focus. Knight doesn’t pretend there are a hundred interesting angles to shoot a car, so he abstracts headlights into beautiful shifting orbs that frame our conflicted hero. It’s a successful effect, and has a way of making the surroundings an expressionist stage for Locke’s state of mind. Unlike Enemy, which I reviewed last week, everything in Locke serves the character and the audience’s investment in him.