Rating: R | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: March 21st, 2025 (USA)
Studio: The Avenue Entertainment
Director(s): David Yarovesky
Writer(s): Michael Arlen Ross / Mariano Cohn & Gastón Duprat (film 4×4)

You can’t have justice without morality.

While David Yarovesky’s Locked might be based on an Argentinian film (Michael Arlen Ross adapts Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s 4×4), it’s also very much a metaphor for today’s America. The car is our country. Expensive, luxurious, and seemingly open to welcome in those who wish to turn their lives around and prosper. As soon as someone enters it, however, they watch as the roads paved in gold dissolve to reveal a cruel and vindictive system of torture porn-level bureaucratic “tests” that are rigged to cause you pain while the tester laughs and revels in their self-satisfied sadism.

William (Anthony Hopkins), the rich, self-pitying doctor who fancies himself a “self-made” man who’s had to watch the rabble destroy his “great nation” while stoking his anger with fear rather than quelling it with charity (think Ebenezer Scrooge if the producers making that weird horror universe of public domain children’s IP added Charles Dickens to the catalog), is our government. Old, white, male, and entitled. He’s so far removed from what it means to be a person struggling to succeed in a system built to fail them that he keeps living on spite to punish them more by reinforcing that system to become even crueler. All to protect his gilded cage. To protect his sense of superiority.

Eddie Barrish (Bill Skarsgård) is us. Yes, he’s a deadbeat dad and petty thief too, but the film takes pains to ensure we know he’s trying to be better. He’s an archetype we’re taught to despise as a villain who’s given the sort of two-dimensional room for empathy to appreciate how straying from a path of righteousness is often necessary to keep your head above water long enough to build a solid life. And even then you’re still probably living paycheck to paycheck with the threat of one bad health scare pulling you back down into poverty. Because even if the mechanic did give Eddie a break and let him take his van back to pay off the debt later, they’re all still “working poor.”

That’s where the difference lies. “Working poor” are battling the system to survive. “Working rich” is an oxymoron. The big action scene at the center of Locked deals with William trying to tell Eddie that he and his ilk (epitomized by two thugs beating up a civilian in an alley) broke the “social contract” first. If they are allowed to abuse, steal, and kill, why shouldn’t he? It’s the sort of superficial false equivalency that the one-percenters and their republican sycophants love to smirk about despite having no basis in reality. I’m not condoning crime, but there is a difference between someone doing something horrible with their back against the wall and someone who wants for nothing shooting them in the head with a grin. One is attempting to survive. The other is having fun.

Does this film have the ability to truly mine that nuance? No. It’s a thriller that leans into the disparity between someone who can afford to build a car with a big enough battery to imprison and torture a victim for days on end and that victim who literally only needs four hundred bucks to stay afloat. Men like William will watch this film and believe he’s the good guy. They’ll treat his actions like the revenge fantasy their lawyers tell them they don’t actually have enough money to commit themselves without consequences. To the wrong audience, Yarovesky has “both sides” the argument because they cannot parse the fact that they are the bad guys. If they just paid taxes, so much of America would be different.

To the correct audience, however, Locked is a pretty accurate depiction of where we are right now. A populace beholden to the whims of an oligarchy setting obvious traps to justify its own violence. The ironic thing is, of course, that the traps they set are always more expensive than the solutions the populace has requested from them. Rather than spend a few million to augment an already working process that combats injustice, billionaires will pay hundreds of millions to erase that process completely and pocket the savings themselves. Why? Because punishment is the point. The Williams of the world don’t want justice. They want to be Gods.

Like so many executives who inevitably become too complacent to understand their own evolving industry and product, though, they forget the people they pay to make their prisons are often the ones they’re trying to trap within them. William believes his bullet-proof and electrified SUV is an impervious vehicle because it is to someone who knows nothing about how it’s made. Sure, the name Dolus (Latin for deception) is a fun nod to it being a Trojan Horse of sorts for Eddie, but I wonder if Achilles would have been more accurate since it possesses a single, very specific weakness. Either way, desperation is always more dangerous than hubris. And if our current government continues to treat us like criminals regardless of guilt, they’ll find out.

Making up for its lack of nuance as far as not accidentally fueling the bad guys’ sanctimony is a suspenseful narrative that allows Skarsgård to command our attention as the protagonist for once. Hopkins is mostly relegated to voice work as his William lays out his hypocrisy and privilege while subduing his prisoner with loud yodeling and extreme HVAC temperatures. The film gets pretty dark once William reveals his conscience is fully broken and the car’s static locale shifts to high speed horror and remote-controlled brutality. One man strives to be the smartest one in the room while the other gradually chips away at proving intellect is no match for ingenuity.

---

Bill Skarsgård in LOCKED; courtesy of The Avenue.