The plot twist I wish Locked Down had
It’s a screwball comedy about pandemic life! Pandemic life without kids, that is.
I watched Locked Down (directed by Doug Liman, streaming on HBO Max) during my children’s midwinter break from remote school. It is one of Hollywood’s first attempts to set a movie in the early days of the COVID pandemic. Linda (Anne Hathaway) has just broken up with her longtime partner Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) when London goes into lockdown, and they are forced to spend their first weeks of breakup trapped in the same house.
As I watched, I experienced some nostalgia for those early days of the pandemic: the quest for flour and toilet paper, the 7 p.m. pot banging for first responders. But looking back implies that something is over, that lockdown is a hellscape these two just have to ride out for a couple more weeks. Too soon to joke, I thought. Someone had recently asked me what we would do with our kids during their break this year. I laughed. “Do with them? They will be with us. They are always with us.”
Tellingly, Linda and Paxton don’t have children. Instead, pandemic lockdown serves as a season of intense introspection: Linda realizes she hates her job and the person it forces her to be. Paxton confronts his depression and self-pity for a series of injustices he has suffered. And under the constraints of shared isolation, they examine their relationship—what held it together for so long, why it started to unravel—in an avalanche of witty barbs and stinging monologues.
