At 2 a.m., the film opens in a quiet family home where shattered glass and untouched food quietly betray a recent argument. Paramedic Maddie [Rosamund Pike] and her husband Frank [Matthew Rhys] drift back to sleep, until a smoky alarm jolts them awake. A call comes from their eighteen-year-old daughter, Alice [Megan McDonnell], who has borrowed Frank’s car and—after a tense confrontation with her parents—drives into the woods. Alice reports that she’s hit someone in the road, and Maddie immediately steps into action, guiding her daughter through CPR with a calm, practiced demeanor born of years on the ambulance crew. The tension spikes as Alice reveals she has been high on MDMA for hours, and that she never returned to the flat she shares with her boyfriend Jakob as her parents assumed she would. The fear is palpable, and Frank makes a devastating choice: he decides he will take the blame for the accident when they reach the scene.
As the car crawls toward Hallow Road, where Alice claims to be, the mood thickens with anxiety and unspoken fears. The parents’ earlier argument—centered on Alice’s pregnancy and what should be done—hangs over them like a fog, complicating every decision and heightening the sense that they are racing against time and memory. Alice confesses she had not called for help right after the crash, deepening the sense of disarray. A second, more external threat emerges when Alice describes another car approaching her location. Frank orders Alice to drag the body of the girl into the undergrowth, a brutal command that adds to the mounting dread. Then the line becomes even tenser as the girl’s face seems to change before the call ends, and a mysterious woman appears on the line, offering help while insisting she’s out driving with her own husband.
The caller’s voice shifts from solicitous to interrogatory, and the woman’s presence becomes a chilling pressure in the car. Maddie fights to end the intrusion, while Alice, increasingly terrified, reports that the girl’s body is now hidden in the undergrowth. A new twist arrives when the unknown woman reappears, claiming that the girl is alive and being cared for by “her husband.” The caller implies a disturbing form of control and insists that the girl must be corrected—the same sentiment the parents have feared all along, but now in a far more sinister register. The mother’s plea for a second chance collides with the mother-in-law of the caller—a voice that seems to know more and to hold a different kind of power over the situation.
As the tension peaks, Frank reveals his original plan to shoulder the blame, a move that underscores the precarious loyalty and the desperate, protective instinct at the heart of the family crisis. The call ends abruptly when the parents are finally parked on Hallow Road, only to discover that Alice is nowhere nearby and a body lies in the undergrowth where they last heard her. Maddie, in a mix of denial and rising panic, returns to the phone to reach Alice again, and is stunned when Alice answers from somewhere else—and appears to be under the control of the unknown woman and her husband as they continue the chilling monologue from a different location. The couple listens as the mysterious duo declare themselves as Alice’s new “parents” and promise to “correct” her, including the fact that Alice is pregnant. Maddie begs for one more chance, but the line goes dead, and the couple can only watch a road blocked by a police car as dawn breaks.
Morning reveals a stark, unsettling tableau: police and detectives surround the scene where a body resembling Alice lies in the undergrowth. Maddie and Frank stand nearby in muted silence, as two detectives discuss the odds that Alice was killed by a passing car and that the family’s late-night call was a trauma-induced illusion rather than a real conversation. The film closes on a somber note, leaving the family to confront the possibility that their memories and perceptions may have been warped by fear, grief, and the harrowing influence of the unknown woman and her husband.
