Locked is the kind of movie that starts like a thriller and ends like a voicemail.

http://childpsychiatryassociates.com/treatment-team/mary-hilliard/mary_hilliard-600/ The premise is killer: A car becomes a prison. Bill Skarsgård plays Eddie, a thief who steals a high-end SUV only to find himself locked inside—physically, psychologically, and morally—by the remote voice of the car’s owner, William (Anthony Hopkins). The car talks. It shocks. It records. It punishes. And you’re in it with him.

For about 20 minutes, it works. Beautifully.

The cabin is claustrophobic. The sound design is vicious. Hopkins’ voice—smooth, icy, deliberate—slithers through the sound system like HAL 9000’s bitter uncle. Skarsgård sells every second of panic. Every gasp, every flinch, every gut-punch realization that he’s not stealing a car—he’s on trial inside one.

But then the movie keeps going.

And going.

What should have been a lean 25-minute short stretches into a padded 95-minute feature. The tension that once hummed starts to wheeze. The film flashes back. It tries to build lore. It monologues. It moralizes. It forgets that the setup was the story.

Hopkins is overqualified and overused. Skarsgård, despite being soaked in sweat and desperation for most of the runtime, can’t save the script from circling.

The movie isn’t bad—it’s just bloated. Stylish, sure. But without drive. A haunted house with cruise control.

There are moments when it hints at something bigger: a meditation on justice, on digital control, on grief. But each thread is abandoned as quickly as it’s introduced. It ends not with a bang, but a “wait, that’s it?”

Locked is a strong short trapped in the body of a feature film. Ironically, it does exactly what its title suggests: it locks itself in—and can’t get out.