Bill Skarsgård Does His Best Pete Davidson In R-Rated Saw Style Thriller

By Robert Scucci
| Published 19 seconds ago

What do you get when you combine Pete Davidson, Anthony Hopkins, a smart car capable of locking in and torturing anybody who dares break into it, and the kind of battle of the wits that was popularized by the first Saw movie? If your guess was 2025’s Locked, you’d be mostly correct, except that there is no Pete Davidson. It’s Bill Skarsgard, covered in tattoos, with bleached-blond hair and a pink hoodie. I knew it was Bill Skarsgård the whole time, but I kept seeing Pete Davidson, like he was originally cast and got swapped out at the last minute.

Oddly enough, Glenn Powell was supposed to take on the lead role for Locked, but he couldn’t commit due to scheduling conflicts, probably because he had to star in another legacy sequel or something.

Identity confusion aside, Locked is a pretty straightforward thriller, and right up your alley if you’re into moral dilemmas, sadistic antagonists with total control, and one of the most irredeemable main characters you still have to root for. At the same time, you kind of hope he gets at least a little maimed along the way because he doesn’t seem capable of learning a valuable lesson.

It’s Basically Saw In A Car With No Torture Or Likeable People

The entire premise for Locked plays like a Saw movie, but not nearly as interesting. Eddie Barrish (Bill Skarsgård doing his best Pete Davidson) is a former (read: still active) criminal and deadbeat father. He doesn’t pay child support, and he always forgets to pick up his daughter Sarah (Ashley Cartwright) from school in the dangerous part of town. When he’s not trying to sell scrap at the auto shop and blow what little money he has on scratch-off tickets, he breaks into cars for walking-around money.

He breaks into the wrong car on this day, a heavily tinted and suspiciously placed Dolus SUV, and his life takes a turn for the worse when the vehicle locks him inside, making it clear that this was exactly what it was designed to do. He receives a phone call from the car’s owner, William (Anthony Hopkins), who explains that after a series of break-ins, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands by turning his car into a rolling torture box. The seats are electrified, and William can control every other feature in the car, like the heat, air conditioning, radio, and even the engine and steering wheel.

The SUV is also soundproofed, with heavily tinted windows, meaning nobody can hear Eddie scream or see inside, despite the fact that it’s parked in a busy lot. The remainder of the film becomes a claustrophobic test of wills as Eddie and William get to know each other. William reveals that he’s a terminally ill doctor, and this is his twisted version of vigilante justice. Eddie initially resists William’s demands to divulge personal information that could ruin his life, but eventually caves when faced with the car’s heat and William blasting yodeling music for hours on end.

In a desperate search for a blind spot in William’s cameras, or a way to short-circuit the car, Eddie uses his street smarts to outmaneuver his captor. The problem is that William has thought through every angle, leaving Eddie with very few options and almost no room for error.

We Have Saw At Home

There’s no way to talk about Locked without bringing up the Saw movies. Here, we have a bad guy in the sense that he’s a petty criminal squandering his life while his daughter actually needs him. He makes no effort to improve his situation, which is exactly how he ends up in William’s car. William is the menacing antagonist whose entire M.O. mirrors Jigsaw from the first Saw film. So we’re not even talking about a deep cut, we’re talking about the core premise of a massive horror franchise, just done in a car, and with its thermostat being the most elaborate booby trap.

Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins play well off each other, even though it looks like whoever handled the wardrobe really wanted Skarsgård to resemble Pete Davidson. Their adversarial dynamic has a strong ebb and flow, especially when Eddie thinks he has the upper hand, only for William to already be 10 steps ahead. From a production, cinematography, film score, and sound design standpoint, Locked is beyond solid. The problem is that the premise has been done to death.

By the time Eddie gets shocked by the car seats for the fourth time, you start to wonder if anything new is going to happen, or if it’s just going to be a guy trapped in a car, grunting uncomfortably the whole time. If I wanted that experience, I would have kept the family hatchback instead of upgrading to an SUV so I could live it every day. Boring.

That said, Locked isn’t a terrible film. It’s just not an original one. If you’re not a horror junkie and are only vaguely familiar with the Saw movies by name, I could see this being a solid watch. But since it’s been done before, and better, I mostly felt underwhelmed despite the strong performances across the board.

As of this writing, Locked is streaming on Hulu.