Nour Wazzi’s first feature turns locked-in syndrome into the engine of a British psychological thriller: a paralysed woman, a nurse who learns to read her eyes, and a family inheritance that nobody in the house wants to explain.

Katherine Carter, a former screen star, lies in a hospital bed after a severe accident, conscious but unable to move or speak. Her eyes are the only channel left to her, and Locked In, the British psychological thriller that Netflix released worldwide on 1 November 2023, is built around the moment she uses them to spell a single word for her nurse: murder. Famke Janssen plays Katherine, Rose Williams plays Lina, the young woman whose marriage sits at the centre of the mystery, and the film asks who in that household had a reason to want Katherine silent.

Locked In is the feature debut of director Nour Wazzi, working from an original screenplay by Rowan Joffé. The cast also includes Alex Hassell, Finn Cole and Anna Friel. It is a United Kingdom and France co-production, made by Neon Films, Gaumont and Wazzi’s own company, Panacea Productions, and it runs 97 minutes. It is an English-language Netflix film rather than a cinema release that later arrived on the platform.

A family, a fortune and a word spelled in blinks

In the present-day thread, Nicky Mackenzie, the nurse played by Anna Friel, begins working with Katherine to help her regain some control over her body. Because Katherine cannot speak, Nicky teaches her to answer the letters of the alphabet by blinking, so that every message has to be assembled one letter at a time. Looking for background on her patient, Nicky turns to Lina, and the questions she starts asking lead the story back into the past.

The flashbacks fill in a complicated family. Lina is the daughter of a childhood friend of Katherine’s; when her mother died, Katherine took her in and adopted her. Katherine’s late husband, a wealthy man, left everything to his son Jamie, played by Finn Cole, and Lina grew up as Jamie’s carer before marrying him as an adult. That makes Katherine both Lina’s adoptive mother and her mother-in-law, and the estate passes through the marriage rather than through her.

Into that house comes Dr Robert Lawrence, the family doctor, played by Alex Hassell. Netflix’s own synopsis frames the film as a clash between an unhappy newlywed and her brittle, damaged mother-in-law, in which an affair sets Lina on a path of secrecy, betrayal and murder, and closes on a question: who is the real victim, and who can she truly trust? We will leave the answer where the film puts it, at the end.

What the setup promises is a double investigation. In the hospital, Nicky works forward, letter by letter, from what Katherine can tell her. In the flashbacks, the story works backward from Lina’s side of events. The tension the premise offers sits in the gap between the two: a witness who can only blink, and a past that the other characters have every reason to tell in their own favour.

Locked-in syndrome, from medical term to thriller device

The condition in the title is real. Locked-in syndrome, a term coined in 1966 by the neurologists Fred Plum and Jerome Posner, describes patients who remain conscious and cognitively intact while almost every voluntary muscle is paralysed, usually except for vertical eye movement and blinking. People living with it often communicate through coded blinks, exactly the system Nicky sets up for Katherine.

Cinema’s best-known portrait of the syndrome is Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), adapted from Jean-Dominique Bauby’s 1997 memoir, which Bauby dictated by blinking as an assistant recited the alphabet. That film, with Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, won prizes at Cannes, the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Césars and earned four Oscar nominations. Locked In borrows the same blink alphabet but points it somewhere else: here the letters are not the pages of a memoir but the pieces of a witness statement.

Nour Wazzi: a first feature pitched from a beach

Nour Wazzi is a UK-Lebanese filmmaker born in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, who has lived and worked in Britain for more than 20 years. She studied media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus on screenwriting, then learned the practical side on a four-month course at the New York Film Academy. Her first short, Wake Up, dates from 2008; seven more followed, among them Habibti (2010), backed by Film London, Up On The Roof (2013) with Maisie Williams, and Baby Mine (2017), the film in which she says she found her voice.

Locked In reached her quickly. Talking to Screen International, which named her one of its Stars of Tomorrow in 2023, she recalled: “I prepped it on the beach, pitched it on Monday morning, and got the job by Monday evening.” She also describes herself, without apology, as a genre filmmaker: “Genre has felt like a dirty word for a long time. I want to direct content that explores the possibilities of our existence in entertaining ways, through a genre lens.”

Before the film, her work for Netflix was in television: in 2022 she directed two episodes of The Last Bus, the streamer’s British science-fiction series for families, a shoot on which she was reunited with crew members she had shadowed while training. In 2023 she was also developing Chimera, a psychological thriller about a woman who senses something strange in her new town, developed with the producers Mary Jane Skalski and Hans Ritter.

Rowan Joffé and the thriller of the unreliable account

The screenplay comes from Rowan Joffé, born in 1973, the son of the director Roland Joffé and the actress Jane Lapotaire. His first two screenplays, Last Resort and Gas Attack, both won the Best New British Feature award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and he directed The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, which won the BAFTA for best single drama in 2009. As a feature director he adapted Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, and he wrote The American for Anton Corbijn and George Clooney. He also created Tin Star, the Sky Atlantic series with Tim Roth.

The closest relative of Locked In in his filmography is Before I Go to Sleep (2014), which he wrote and directed from S. J. Watson’s novel, with Nicole Kidman as a woman who wakes every day without her memory and has to rely on what the people around her choose to tell her. Both stories put a heroine in a position where she cannot check the version of events she is given, and both turn that weakness into the mechanism of the plot.

In genre terms, the film sits in the family of domestic thrillers built on a marriage, money and shifting points of view, the territory that Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl made so popular in the 2010s. Locked In adds a large country house and an inheritance to that template, and the hospital bed gives it a ticking clock: the more Katherine can communicate, the more dangerous she becomes to someone.

The cast: Janssen, Williams, Hassell, Cole and Friel

Famke Janssen, born in Amstelveen in the Netherlands in 1964, came to acting after a modelling career and is known worldwide as Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (1995) and Jean Grey in the X-Men films from 2000 to 2014, along with the Taken trilogy, Nip/Tuck, How to Get Away with Murder and the Netflix series Hemlock Grove. Katherine is an unusual lead for her: in the hospital scenes the premise leaves the character almost no movement and no speech, while the flashbacks show her before the accident.

Rose Williams, born in Ealing, London, in 1994, is best known as Charlotte Heywood in Sanditon, the adaptation of Jane Austen‘s unfinished novel, and played Princess Claude in Reign and Caterina Sforza in Medici. Screen named her a Star of Tomorrow in 2019, and her film credits include Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris with Lesley Manville. Deadline’s casting report in December 2022 put her at the top of the bill alongside Famke Janssen.

Alex Hassell trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, played Hal and Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company and co-founded The Factory Theatre Company; on screen he has been Translucent in The Boys, Vicious in Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop and, after this film, Rupert Campbell-Black in Rivals. Finn Cole, born in 1995, is Michael Gray in Peaky Blinders and J Cody in Animal Kingdom, and played the young Jakob Toretto in F9.

Anna Friel first became famous as Beth Jordache in the Channel 4 soap Brookside, earned a Golden Globe nomination for Pushing Daisies and won the International Emmy for best actress in 2017 for the detective series Marcella. Karl Collins plays Katherine’s neurosurgeon.

Behind the camera: from Neon Films to St Albans Cathedral

The film was produced by Nicky Bentham for Neon Films, the London company behind The Duke with Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren (not to be confused with the American distributor Neon), with Alison Jackson as executive producer for Gaumont. The cinematographer is Remi Adefarasin, who in 1999 became the first black cinematographer nominated for the Academy Award, for Elizabeth (1998), and who received the British Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2026. Alex Baranowski wrote the music and Fiona DeSouza edited.

Principal photography began in London on 20 December 2022, the day before Deadline revealed the cast, and was scheduled to run until February 2023. In late January 2023 the crew moved to St Albans, in Hertfordshire, where a filming notice delivered to residents named the production Locked In and Gaumont Ltd as the company behind it; the shoot used St Albans Cathedral and the town’s market square.

Release and the Netflix Top 10

Netflix released the official trailer on 5 October 2023 and the film arrived on the platform on 1 November. In its first week, 30 October to 5 November 2023, Locked In was number one on Netflix’s global Top 10 of English-language films, with 17.8 million views and 28.8 million hours watched. It held second place the following week with 13.2 million views and was fourth in its third week with 5.1 million, for roughly 36 million views in three weeks.

Those numbers say how many people pressed play, not what they made of it, and they fit a familiar Netflix pattern: a British thriller with recognisable faces and a premise that fits in one line, launched without a cinema run, finding its audience through the home screen. Locked In remains a Netflix film, so the platform is still where it can be watched.

What Locked In sets out to do

On paper, Locked In is a wager on structure: a central witness reduced to yes, no and single letters, and a truth that depends on who is reading her. For viewers who arrive from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it is worth knowing that this is a genre piece rather than a medical portrait; for those who enjoyed Before I Go to Sleep or the domestic thrillers that followed Gone Girl, the shape will feel familiar. Whether the two timelines lock together is a judgement each viewer will make by the end.