Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Locke
2014 · Steven Knight · Locke on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the reflections layered over the windshield glass. (camera)
Haris Zambarloukos layers streaks of headlights and doubled ghost images of Locke's own face over the glass, so the road and the man blur into each other.
Payoff: The windscreen becomes a second screen showing you the world dissolving into the drive.
Listen for how many people you hear but never see. (sound)
Every other character in the film arrives only through the car's speakerphone, so the entire supporting drama is carried by voice alone.
Payoff: The film builds a whole world out of people you're never actually shown.
Notice that the film never once cuts away from the car. (staging)
Everything dramatic in the story happens off-screen through voice, while the camera stays locked inside the same car interior for the entire running time.
Payoff: The refusal to ever leave the car is the film's whole formal discipline.
Watch the tightening around Hardy's eyes during hard calls. (performance)
Tom Hardy plays Locke as a man defined by control, and the drama lives in small cracks in that control rather than in big outward displays.
Payoff: The performance holds one steady quality on the surface while everything underneath keeps shifting. In the reading: icon of quality (affection-image). The reading calls a face held on one steady quality like this a qualisign, control presented as a single sustained image.
Notice how empty the passenger and back seats stay. (setting)
The empty seats beside and behind Locke are staged as deliberately as any occupied space, part of the car's spare, theatrical geography.
Payoff: Absence itself becomes something you're asked to keep watching throughout the film.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch his face, not the road. Every crack in his composure is the only action this film allows him.