Matthew Rhys and Rosamund Pike shared the screen in one of 2025’s best psychological thrillers, but almost nobody noticed at the time. The film was released in the UK and Ireland in May 2025 and then had a limited theatrical run in the US, with brief marketing aimed at a Halloween release. It came and went without much fanfare. But the streaming era has a way of giving underseen films a second shot, and that is exactly what is happening now.
The film follows two parents, played by Rhys and Pike, who get a phone call in the middle of the night from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell). She’s panicking and says she accidentally hit someone with her car. Naturally, they race to find her, but another couple finds Alice first. The parents hear Alice talk to the couple over the phone, and as the calls go on, the tension just keeps building, with every new detail making the situation feel worse than the last. The film is very much in the same vein as Jake Gyllenhaal’s The Guilty and** Tom Hardy**‘s Locke, two films that proved a contained, phone call-driven thriller can be just as gripping as any action blockbuster.
That film is Hallow Road, and it has been sitting at an 88% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes since its release. Critics clearly loved it, and general audiences are now catching up. Since landing on Hulu on May 2, the film has consistently placed in the platform’s Top 10 for three consecutive days. And according to FlixPatrol, it currently sits at #8 on Hulu’s most popular movies list.
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
The timing of Hallow Road’s streaming surge matters beyond just one film’s second life because it puts a spotlight on director Babak Anvari at exactly the right moment. Anvari has been handed one of genre cinema’s most complicated franchises to revive. The Cloverfield series started strong with Matt Reeves’ 2008 found-footage monster movie and followed it up with 10 Cloverfield Lane, a tense psychological drama that barely featured any monsters and only connected to the original in its final five minutes. But it ended up being a big hit with both critics and audiences, and was seen as a worthy spiritual successor to the original. Then came The Cloverfield Paradox, which looked at all that goodwill and decided to take things to space, add alternate realities, black holes, and confusing timelines. It turned into a messy sci-fi fever dream and pretty much killed the entire franchise.
That was… until now. We’re finally getting a new Cloverfield movie, and Anvari’s entry is being positioned as something different. Unlike the previous sequels, which were spiritual successors only loosely tied to the first film, this new Cloverfield is described as a direct sequel to the 2008 original. It is set in a world permanently altered by the “Clover” attack and deals with the aftermath of a civilization that sacrificed the entire city of Manhattan to eliminate the monster. Specific plot details are being kept under wraps for now, but the framing alone signals a genuine attempt to rebuild the franchise on solid ground rather than loosely connected side stories, and Hallow Road makes a strong case that Anvari is the right person for the job.
*Hallow Road *is available to stream on Hulu. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates
](/tag/movie/hallow-road/)
](/tag/thriller/)
William Gillies