Locke

Steven Knight had written Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and had just made his directing debut with Hummingbird, when he wrote and directed Locke. It premiered out of competition at the 70th Venice International Film Festival in September 2013, played in the Spotlight section at Sundance the following January, and won Knight the British Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay. The same year he began Peaky Blinders for the BBC.

The conceit is severe. Tom Hardy's Ivan Locke, a construction manager with a soft voice and a methodical mind, is the only person we see. Everyone else reaches him over the car's speakerphone: his boss, his inexperienced deputy, his wife, his sons, a hospital, the council. Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, Andrew Scott, Ben Daniels and a young Tom Holland supply the voices. The film was shot in real time over six nights, the BMW X5 towed along the M6 on a low trailer and the crew stopping only to change the memory cards in its three cameras, while the other actors phoned in live from a conference room. Haris Zambarloukos's camera turns motorway lights into smeared constellations across the windscreen.

Reviews were outstanding: 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and 83 on Metacritic, with Hardy's performance, which won him the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for Best Actor, singled out everywhere. David Thomson later wrote that no recent film had been more eloquent about how alone we feel. It is a thriller in which the stakes are entirely ordinary, and it has since inspired a stage adaptation and a French remake.