Locked (2025)

Locked arrives as a remake of the Argentine thriller 4x4, and it conducts itself with the grim efficiency of a man who has already read the lease on his own coffin. Bill Skarsgård plays Eddie, a petty thief and indifferent father who climbs into a luxury SUV and finds himself sealed inside a customized trap. Anthony Hopkins, as the wealthy doctor who built it, addresses him through the dashboard with the serenity of a man watering his garden. The two of them carry nearly the whole picture between them, and the picture is better for it.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film keeps its ambitions modest. A few supporting players of varied background pass through without comment, and the camera never lingers to congratulate anyone. The villain's wealth supplies a faint tang of class resentment, though the script treats his crusade as private grief, not an indictment of privilege. His daughter, we learn, was killed during a robbery, and that loss drives him, not the system. Race, gender, climate, neurodivergence: the film has no interest in any of it. A taunt or two about the thief's choices is as close as it comes to sermonizing, and even those land as cruelty, not instruction.

The result is a tight, mean chamber piece that trusts the audience enough to skip the lecture. It does not ask us to applaud its values, because it has so few to display. What it offers instead is a man in a box, a voice from above, and the slow arithmetic of survival. There are worse ways to spend ninety minutes. There are also more instructive ones, and the film seems content to let the instructors keep their classrooms.