Locked

Eddie (Bill Skarsgard) is a freeloader who has exhausted all his options. His van is stuck at the mechanic’s because he doesn’t have enough cash to pay for its repairs. He’s separated from his wife, and it’s his day to pick up his daughter from school. After calling everyone he knows, no one will lend him money because he only calls when he needs something. So Eddie resorts to swiping wallets, buying scratch-offs, and trying to break into cars.

Eddie eventually stumbles onto an unlocked luxury SUV. He rummages through its interior and mostly finds nothing only to realize that he’s locked inside. After trashing what he can with his hands and injuring his arm, Eddie stupidly pulls out a gun and discovers that the windows are bulletproof after the ricochet results in a bullet in his leg.

With little food or water and no phone reception, Eddie is now at the whim of a madman named William (Anthony Hopkins) who communicates via Bluetooth and gets off on seeing Eddie suffer thanks to the half a dozen cameras installed in the car.

In 2019, I saw an Argentinian crime thriller called 4x4 at Fantastic Fest. 4x4 has been remade three separate times since then: a Brazilian remake from 2022 called A Jaula, a Telugu language Indian remake also from 2022 called Dangalunnaru Jaagrathu, and an American remake debuting in 2025 known as Locked.

Locked is not a direct remake of 4x4. The concept is the same as the initial struggle of the thief main character getting into the car, getting injured, and turning to desperation such as licking condensation off the windows and drinking his piss for water with a doctor antagonist being in control of the majority of the film. But everything else changes after that.

The conflict of 4x4 was always based around the main character being poor with a wealthy captor. 4x4 concludes in a way that seems logical for a car thief protagonist and a doctor who made a car into a torture device. It isn’t a happy ending and it shouldn’t be because...