Last week, HBO Max released a film called Locked Down, a thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film is mostly unremarkable, with two likable actors being likable but not particularly inspired, and the thriller aspect is especially limp; it’s a heist movie that really doesn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a complicated heist. It is the very definition of a movie you forget about an hour after you’ve seen it.
But there’s one unique thing about it: It was made during the pandemic. Directed by Doug Liman, it was written, shot, and edited entirely in the age of Covid-19. The movie’s plot revolves around a couple (played by Hathaway and Ejiofor) who break up right when the stay-at-home orders land in London; they want to separate, but now they’re stuck together. (Eventually, they plan a heist if only because the movie needs something for them to do.) Thus, we have a movie about people who are doing the same thing we are doing: Being stuck at home and going crazy. Stars: They’re just like us!
What’s most fascinating about Locked Down, though, is not that it’s a movie made during quarantine or that Liman is close enough buddies with Ben Kingsley and Ben Stiller to get them to cameo in the film over Zoom or even that they got to film inside the Harrod’s vault, though that scene actually is a nice touch. What’s most fascinating is that the film, even though it’s meant to capture the way we live now is already, while we’re still in the pandemic, a dated time capsule. Locked Down is a period piece.
Because it takes a while to make movies, even ones you’re in a hurry to finish, the story has to be set during a specific time of the pandemic. Locked Down takes place roughly in April or May of last year, early on the pandemic, back when we all thought we were just trying to flatten the curve and keep ourselves occupied watching Tiger King and making bread. (At one point, Ejiofor’s character actually decides to make his own bread.) That’s to say: It takes place before everything got too crazy. The George Floyd protests hadn’t happened yet, the election was still months away, and no one had, you know, stormed the United States Capitol in a violent effort to overturn American democracy. The characters in Locked Down don’t know any of that’s coming — they’ll end up watching in horror from abroad anyway — and they think this is just going to be a temporary inconvenience, a curiosity they’ll look back on and laugh about. There are even jokes about people buying too much toilet paper. Remember that? Remember when that’s the main thing we were worried about?
