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In the new B-movie “Locked,” Bill Skarsgård plays a down-on-his-luck guy named Eddie who breaks into a luxury SUV in an attempt to make some money to support his family. Unfortunately for Eddie, the owner of that SUV is a deranged maniac named William (Anthony Hopkins), who remotely locks Eddie inside and tortures him over the course of multiple days in an attempt to try to teach him a lesson about right and wrong. A huge percentage of the film takes place inside this vehicle as we’re trapped there with Eddie, and in the wrong hands, exploring such a small space over the course of an entire movie could get very boring, very quickly.
Thankfully, director David Yarovesky (“Brightburn”) knows how to keep things visually interesting. In a recent interview (which you can hear in full below), he told me all about how he and his collaborators stuck to two distinct cinematic languages over the course of the film: Outside the vehicle, the handheld camera moves in a way befitting a grounded indie film, reflective of Eddie’s hard-scrabble life. But inside, we’re in William’s world, and the camera movements are a lot smoother and more planned and methodical to represent the amount of control he has over this bonkers trap he’s set.
The latter style is best embodied in the shot where Eddie first breaks into the car. The camera circles around the vehicle multiple times as Eddie searches through it, looking for anything of value, and tracks him as he tries to kick the windows out after he realizes he’s locked in. The camera moves in such a way that it would have had to slice through the physical body of the SUV in order to achieve as it spins around, so I asked Yarovesky if he achieved the shot by shooting the scene in a vehicle that had its top half removed and then replacing it and everything outside the windows using visual effects in post-production.
Nope. Turns out the real answer is way more practical — and as a result, much cooler.
Locked didn’t have to go that hard with its production design, but the movie is better because of it
To facilitate the camera circling around Eddie (who was originally going to be played by Glen Powell!) as he entered the SUV, production designer Grant Armstrong figured out how to build a practical version of the vehicle that could do things the audience would never notice. Here’s how Yarovesky explained it:
“We built the set on a platform with rails built into the platform. The set’s in segments. Every piece of the car can just slide on the rails easily. You could just, with one hand, slide it back and forth. But they had to develop a locking mechanism, so not only could it slide, but it comes in and locks down so Bill can hit it or try to break out of it. So the whole thing, each piece, it can explode like this [mimics an explosion outward] or come in like this [mimics the opposite action]. So what you’re seeing happen is, one piece at a time, a chunk of the car slides away as the camera comes in and goes back so that you don’t see it. And so on, and so on, and we’re just rotating, 360 degrees around, and just spinning and watching the events play out in this tense, methodical shot.”
Is “Locked” my favorite movie of 2025? No. But that level of creativity and attention to detail resulted in a genuine “how the heck did they do this?” moment for me, and I respect the heck out of these filmmakers for going the extra mile to create an immersive experience for the audience — and doing it practically instead of taking the lazy way out.
My colleague BJ Colangelo and I spoke about “Locked,” which is based on a 2019 Argentinian thriller called “4×4,” on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which also contains my full interview with David Yarovesky. Listen in here:
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