Locke

The whole ninety minutes of Locke takes places inside his car and Tom Hardy (as Locke) is the only actor you see on screen. The supporting actors and actresses appear only as voices on the other end of his mobile phone. Thankfully on a hands-free kit or else it may have been a bit hard to follow, not to mention dangerous. 

I was a little sceptical about the whole idea and almost skipped this one in protest at such dullness. Good job I didn’t.

Ivan Locke is a construction manager about to oversee a massive foundation laying exercise for a huge new building. On the eve of this he climbs into his car and makes a phone call to tell his boss Gareth (Ben Daniels) that he isn’t going to be there to supervise. That isn’t going to go down well.

Then he phones his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) to tell her he isn’t coming home to her tonight and to tell his sons he won’t be there to watch the football with them. Katrina has even put the club shirt on for him and has the sausages under the grill. Then he tells her why, another woman is about to give birth to his child. That's going to go down even less well.

Then he phones Bethan (Olivia Colman). A woman he describes as plain and old with whom he once briefly worked and had a one night stand with, mostly out of sympathy. She is now giving birth to his child with very poor timing.

He has decided to abandon everything to attend the birth even though he barely knows her and certainly doesn’t love her because the child is his responsibility. 

While he makes the drive down the motorway from Birmingham to London, we are party to the calls he makes and receives. All the while his personal and professional life collapses around him.

After confessing his infidelity, his wife bans him from their home. Meanwhile his company bosses in Chicago fire him, yet his sense of duty means he takes every step to ensure the pour of the concrete that will make the foundations will succeed, talking his stand-in Donal (Andrew Scott), a man who likes a drink or two, through what he needs to do.

Locke is a man with an unrelenting belief that he doing the right thing.

I though it was excellent. A refreshingly low budget, captivating voyeur type film and something quite different. Tom Hardy is terrific but he has to be, no one else was going to carry the film if he didn’t. Simply because there is no one else.

The Double

The Double is loosely based on the Dostoevsky novel.

We meet Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) on a train; deep in his own thoughts. Thoughts which are interrupted when someone tells him he's in his seat. The rest of the carriage is empty but Simon decides to move anyway. Then instead of taking another seat he chooses to stand in the empty carriage, this you realise later is important.

You see Simon is insignificant and he knows it. At work, nobody knows him or even remembers him from one day to the next despite him working there for seven years. He has ideas but nobody, least of all his boss, wants to listen to them and he lacks the courage to speak up for himself. As for the cute girl who does the photocopying (Mia Wasikowska), he knows he’s never going to have the confidence to declare his interest in her.

If Simon lacks balls, then James must have extra. James Simon is a new work colleague and is everything Simon wants to be. He is confident and adored by everyone. He is also Simon’s double, an exact physical double. Although this fact goes unnoticed by everyone apart from Simon himself.

At first Simon makes friends with him and helps him with his work only to see James lauded by his boss using Simon’s own ideas. Not only is James an instant hit with his boss, he proves irresistible to the girls as well. Whilst Hannah of photocopying room has never given Simon a second glance, she is immediately enthralled by James and asks Simon to fix them up.

The big question throughout is, is James real? and how much of what we see actually is real? Is James merely an alter-ego? There are hints in many directions but we never get to really find out.

Of course I could be reading too much into this and it’s simply meant to show how ridiculous it could be if someone double did really appear in to their life.

The film is a real curiosity piece, which needed a few pints to debrief it afterwards. Sadly we have a race tomorrow. Pretty much like ‘Under the Skin’ last week, this is a film that will divide opinion.

After filming this together Eisenberg and Wasikowska became an item, so I wonder which one she preferred.