Feeling Claustrophobic? Here Are The Best, Worst And Weirdest Movies Set In A Single Location

In Locke, Tom Hardy spends the entirety of the runtime in the driver’s seat of his car. At first he appears to simply finishing his shift as a construction site manager to go home to his wife and kids. However, it soon becomes obvious that something is amiss. Through a series of initially cryptic phone calls, we learn that Ivan Locke is deserting his job — and there’s a second woman on the phone, this one in a hospital at the other end of the freeway. To say any more would ruin the fun, and given how minimalist Locke is, you’ll need all the unspoiled twists and turns that you can get.

Just like Roy Orbison once sang, Hardy’s Locke drives all night. The entire film takes place in the confines of his car, and writer/director Steven Knight does a surprisingly good job at keeping the suspense and tension going, even if by film’s end it feels as if it has amounted to little. Knight is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Eastern Promises (2007), so low-key thrills that are based on human interactions are his specialty; it was a wise move to keep his second film as director a low-key affair.

Locke is just the latest in a somewhat odd tradition of single-location films; movies that find drama, comedy, frights, or some mixture of all three, without ever leaving home base, wherever that may be. here are some of the best, the worst, and the weirdest.

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Perhaps the most famous director of all time, Hitchcock was never afraid to experiment. Like a reality show contestant with immunity, Hitchcock’s prior successes allowed him to do more with more impunity than other filmmakers could get away with. The most famous would be Rear Window (1954), a film that has been copied in Disturbia (2007), remade with Christopher Reeves (1998), and spoofed more times than I can count, but most famously by The Simpsons in season six’s episode “Bart of Darkness”. It’s one of the British director’s finest films and watching stars Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly navigate the tale of voyeurism gone wrong still thrills.

Another apartment-bound murder thriller is Rope (1948) wherein two men – disguised homosexuals, but obvious to modern audiences – murder a friend and invite people over to prove they can get away with murder. Filmed as if it’s all one-take, it remains remarkably effective. Perhaps best of all, however, is Lifeboat (1944) about a group of survivors during WWII after their boat is torpedoed who find themselves stranded with the German officer responsible for the attack. Underrated, and a powerful exploration of human dynamics.

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Broadway Babies

Broadway adaptations can be tricky. On stage the single location isn’t a bother, but they often lack what makes a movie cinematic when adapted to the big screen. Roman Polanski has taken it upon himself in recent years to adapt some of Broadway’s most popular plays, but to lesser success. Carnage (2011) and Venus in Fur (2014) both take antagonistic opposites and see how they react in confined spaces; the latter is the more successful, as Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski’s wife) turns the tables on a theatre director in a battle of sexual wits.

Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001) has some very interesting politics at its centre, and the director of Boyhood does his best to keep the energy alive in its hotel-room setting, but it’s only once Uma Thurman arrives on the scene with suspicious motives does it pick up. Less successful is Oleanna (1994), a film in which David Mamet, who adapted his own play, appears intent on making viewers hate women as much as he does.

At a time of career upheaval, Robert Altman lent his talent to adapting two small plays, Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean. Jimmy Dean (1982) alternates between the past and the modern day, where the members of a James Dean fanclub (including Cher, Karen Black and Kathy Bates) reunite to trade anecdotes, secrets, and revelations. His less successful Secret Honor is inspired by the life of Richard Nixon, but lacks the visual inventiveness and dynamite acting of Jimmy Dean.

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The Horror Within

William Friedkin returned to the horror genre 33 years after The Exorcist (1973) with the deeply unsettling Bug (2006) starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon as a couple of social outcasts with creeping paranoia. It’s the sort of film that will make hypochondriacs itch with fear – the title isn’t ambiguous – and puts something like Silent House (2010) to shame. That Peruvian film, remade a year later with Elizabeth Olsen, is an insult to viewers, with a ridiculous twist that undermines all the scares that came before.

The Paranormal Activity movies have made a five-film franchise (with more to come) out of propping a few cameras up in a house and letting the ghostly shenanigans unfold, but recent entries have ventured away from the simple setup. Likewise, Pontypool (2008) finds amazing mileage out of a quasi-zombie film set entirely in a radio station with news filtering in during a morning shock-jock radio program about rabid hordes of seemingly cannibalistic crazies. The end is a disappointment, but it is a remarkably strong and scary good time.

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Chatty Cathy

Sometimes filmmakers have the simplest idea. My Dinner with Andre (1981), for instance, is, as the title suggests, about a man (perennial “that guy!” Wallace Shawn) going out for dinner with a man called Andre Gregory. In much the same way that a party conversation can enrapture and engage, so too does this film, and it has lived on in pop culture from Christopher Guest to Community. Likewise, the moral and ethical dilemmas of the famed 12 Angry Men (1957) are far more interesting to watch than rapidly edited explosions and robot wars. It’s ranked no. 8 on IMDb’s top 250, which is an impressive feat.

Less interesting is The Man from Earth (2007), which takes a somewhat interesting premise involving a man who’s been alive for thousands of years and moves from town to town whenever anybody notices he doesn’t age, and turns it into a bland discussion of religion with added romance. Much more entertaining is The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), the best film on this entire list. Just try and not be amazed by the German alcoholic lesbian fashion-designer who abuses her assistant and her family at every turn and orders “ten bottles of gin!” as she stumbles around drunk at her birthday. She’s my kinda gal.

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Mansion Madness

It’s stretching the definition, given mansions offer multiple rooms within a single location, but the likes of Sleuth (1972) with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine – preferably not the 2007 sequel with Michael Caine again and Jude Law – and Deathtrap, also with Michael Caine, are wicked, frequently enthralling films that pair older and younger protagonists against each other in games of wits. More recently, David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002) had Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart as a (scarily identical) mother and daughter duo terrorised by home invaders after the loot that’s hidden in their elaborately-designed apartment’s panic room.

Murder by Death (1976) was made as a spoof of the Agatha Christie/Hercule Poirot/Miss Marple style of murder mysteries, but is hampered by being terribly unfunny and also incredibly racist. Once upon a time people gave Peter Sellers a lot of leeway to do whatever he wanted, which too often seemed to involve changing skin-tone. While the role of Wang is meant as a critique of the wildly exaggerated and stereotypical Charlie Chan character, that still doesn’t mean it isn’t uncomfortable to watch a white man parade about in Asian make-up, dropping his R’s and wearing a kimono. Clue (1985) is a much better movie, based on the popular mystery board-game. With an amazing cast, endlessly quotable dialogue, and a winking wit, it’s one of the funniest movies of the ‘80s.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer from Melbourne who is currently based in New York City. He also works as an editor and a film festival programmer while tweeting too much @glenndunks.

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Locke is in cinemas this week.