Locked

Bill Skarsgård is a would-be car thief and Anthony Hopkins is the vengeful tormentor toying with him inside a SUV-turned-torture chamber in this tightly wound thriller.

“Locked” is a tidy little thriller — obviously low in budget, but surprisingly high in anxiety and unexpected twists. It features world-class actor Anthony Hopkins, as well as starring Bill Skarsgård, who’s no slouch himself.

Here, Skarsgård gets to play in one of his seemingly rare roles where he’s not buried behind layers of FX makeup and/or CGI — such as “It,” “Eternals” and last year’s “Nosferatu” (for which he should’ve gotten an Oscar nod). He’s a nice-looking kid, so I’m glad he’s getting a chance to break out of the round hole Hollywood seems to want to pound him into.

He plays Eddie, a twitchy con artist and street thief. We watch as his eyes constantly wander over an unattended wallet, a purse within reach or anything else he might be able to boost.

Normally we wouldn’t have any empathy for a scumbag like Eddie, except he’s got a sweet young kid, Sarah (Ashley Cartwright), whom he dubs “Love Bug” and is constantly disappointing. His latest jam is the run-down van he uses to haul merchandise around is in the shop, so Eddie keeps missing picking his kid up from school. And he’s short the cash to fix it.

In between small snatch jobs, he comes across what seems like easy pickings: a high-end luxury SUV — fictional brand: Dolus — sitting unattended in a dank downtown parking lot. What’s more, it’s not even locked. Eddie quickly enters and begins rifling through for anything he can steal.

Unfortunately for Eddie, this particular vehicle is owned by William (Hopkins), a wealthy doctor who’s had his car broken into one time too many. That, along with some other trauma we’ll hear about later, has led him to turn the Dolus into a high-tech torture chamber from which it’s impossible to escape.

Eddie soon finds himself locked in. The windows are bullet- and shatter-proof, the seats are electrified to tase him, and William can crank the temperature from sub-Saharan to arctic. He’ll even put on some yodeling music and crank the volume up to 11. Eddie has a gun, and in trying to shoot out the window seriously injures himself.

William talks to him through the intercom system, explaining upfront that he’s doing this so he can get some joyful revenge on the dregs of society like Eddie. William demonstrates how much he wants to tease things out by bandaging Eddie’s wounds when he passes out. He deprives his prisoner of food and water, so Eddie is eventually forced to take some drastic measures to stay alive.

Things go from there. Hopkins borrows notes from his Hannibal Lecter symphony, playing William as well-mannered and high-class, even as he inflicts the most miserable predations upon Eddie. As we learn more about him, the outrages William has suffered don’t exactly endear him to the audience, but we at least feel like he’s not some random sicko inflicting pain just because he likes doing it.

Skarsgård is terrific at garnering empathy for Eddie, despite being a pretty scummy guy. He tries to reason with William, explaining that while he readily admits he’s a bad guy, he would never kill or torture someone. We find ourselves starting to root for him to escape, as he pokes and prods around the Dolus for any sort of advantage.

Director David Yarovesky specializes in horror and scary movies (“Brightburn,” “Nightbooks”) and shows an expert, patient hand at stoking the film’s tension carefully rather than just jumping straight into max-out mode. “Locked” is a remake of an Argentinian film, “4x4,” with Michael Arlen Ross handling the screenplay adaptation.

Ross is the ultra-rare crossover — and by rare, I mean I’ve never heard of it before — of a film editor who turned to writing. When you think about it, the two roles actually sync up in a lot of ways. The ability to control pace and mood are the hardest things to get right in filmmaking, and Ross’ script is adept at both.

I was not expecting any great shakes out of “Locked.” First blush, it looked like the sort of low production value project actors sometimes have to take in between the high-profile stuff. But it steals your attention, and holds it.