A Film About Waiting for a Bus

There is a bus stop at the end of a road on the edge of a small town. It has a shelter with a bench, a timetable nobody trusts, and a view of a field. Over the course of one day, eleven people wait there. Some of them get on a bus. Some of them give up. That is the whole of Hollow Road, the second feature by Petra Valmont, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since I saw it in a half-empty cinema on a wet Tuesday afternoon.

The film is ninety-four minutes long and almost entirely static. Valmont places her camera on the other side of the road, facing the shelter, and leaves it there. She cuts only when the light changes enough to need a new exposure, which gives the film a structure closer to a sundial than to a story. We begin in the blue before dawn, with a nurse finishing a night shift, and end in full dark, with a teenager who has missed the last bus and is deciding whether to call his mother.

In between, people arrive, sit, stand, look down the road, look at their phones, look at each other. A woman and her elderly father argue about a hospital appointment in a language the film does not subtitle, and we understand every word. Two schoolgirls share one pair of headphones. A man in a suit rehearses what is clearly a difficult conversation, moving his lips without sound. A bus comes, late, and takes most of them. Another does not come at all.

What Valmont understands, and what so few filmmakers are brave enough to trust, is that waiting is not the absence of an event. It is an event with its own shape. It has a beginning, when you arrive and check the time. It has a middle, when hope turns into doubt and then into a kind of stubborn patience. And it has an end, which is not always the arrival of what you were waiting for. Sometimes it is just the moment you stand up and decide to walk.

The film is full of those moments, and each one lands with more force than any plot twist could. When the man in the suit finally gives up on the bus and sets off on foot down the road, still rehearsing, still moving his lips, the audience in my screening let out a collective breath. When the nurse, dozing on the bench, almost misses the first bus of the morning and the driver waits for her with the doors open, a woman two rows ahead of me began to cry.

The sound design deserves its own paragraph. There is no score. Instead we hear the field behind the shelter, the wind in the timetable frame, distant traffic, a dog, and, every so often, the rising note of an engine that might be the bus and usually is not. Valmont and her sound recordist have made the anticipation audible. By the second hour I found myself leaning forward at every engine sound, exactly like the people on the screen.

Not everything works. A sequence in the middle, in which two strangers begin a flirtation that the film seems unsure what to do with, goes on too long and ends too neatly. And the choice to hold the final shot for almost four minutes after the teenager has left the frame will divide audiences. I was glad of it. The couple next to me left before it ended.

But these are small complaints about a film that does something I have rarely seen done so well. It takes the most ordinary and least cinematic experience of modern life, the experience of waiting for a public service that may or may not arrive, and it finds in it everything a film needs: character, suspense, comedy, grief and a sense of place so exact that I could draw you a map of that shelter.

Hollow Road is playing in a handful of cinemas this summer. If it comes to yours, go on a weekday afternoon, when the room is almost empty. You will spend ninety-four minutes waiting with strangers, and you will not want it to end.