Writer/director Steven Knight delivers his best work yet with Locke, a fascinating, intimate portrait of a good man reaping the repercussion of an immoral act.

Knight has a knack for writing male characters of solid facade that are stripped bare, layer by layer. Joining the likes of Russian mobster Nikolai (portrayed by Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises) and avenging angel Joey (portrayed by Jason Statham in Hummingbird) is Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), a family man and construction manager who on the eve of his biggest professional accomplishment receives a call that will change his life, as he hits the road to an unknown future.

It’s the set up that makes Locke unique. Here we have one actor, in the one setting of a car, fielding calls on a handset free car phone, while racing against time to reach the next regrettable phase of his life as everything he has built is destroyed, brick by brick.

Yet novelty this is not. So strong are the effective writing, the technically proficient direction, and the multi-layered performances, that any thought of Locke as simply a gimmick film should be brushed aside and stomped on.   

What makes it all work is the brilliant casting of Tom Hardy. Needed was not only an actor capable to deliver the complexities and darkly comic moments in Knight’s script, but also an actor of strong screen presence who can (literally) make talking into a phone a mesmerising, emotionally heavy viewing experience.

Hardy does all that in one of his best performances thus far, delivering Knight’s excellent dialogue with calm, measured tones that mask a palpable heartbreak, all the while combating a deluge of phone calls from his wife (Ruth Wilson), his boss (Ben Daniels) and his hapless second in charge (Andrew Scott) like a one armed slugger in a batting cage combating fast balls.

Watching a good man’s legacy destroyed is never an easy thing, especially a man that’s presented as sympathetically (yet in no way pure) as Ivan Locke. Knight has delivered not only a powerfully minimalistic picture, but a morally attuned one as well, that portrays how one immoral act can bring about a lifetime of affliction. It also provides another example as to why Tom Hardy is one of the great actors working today.