If you were offered $100,000 to have a one-minute phone call, would you do it? For most people, that would be a no-brainer. But what if that phone call made you face your worst nightmare? That offer probably wouldn’t sound as appealing anymore.
This is the premise for Timothy Woodward Jr.’s The Call. Set in 1987, the story focuses on four teenagers who are summoned to the home of Edith Cranston (Lin Shaye), whom they’ve been harassing because one of the teenagers believes this woman abducted her sister years ago. They’re greeted at the door by Edward Cranston (Tobin Bell), who informs them that Edith had killed herself — but left them all in her will. She wants to give them $100,000 with a strange caveat: they each must go upstairs alone, dial a phone number, and stay on the call for one minute. Needless to say, this doesn’t go well. Edith’s spirit is feeling more vengeful than philanthropic, and the teenagers are forced to relive some of their darkest moments and face their greatest fears, fighting to stay alive.
Seeing two horror heavy-hitters acting together was a delight in this film. Lin Shaye, best known for her role in the Insidious movies, and Tobin Bell, who plays the notorious mastermind in the Saw franchise, have great on-screen chemistry and do an excellent job at playing a sinister couple hellbent on revenge. They also manage to stir up some sympathy for themselves with their performances, which is rare in a film like this where most characters tend to stay mostly two-dimensional. For this reason, it’s a shame Shaye receives such little screen time, despite being a constant presence in the film.
It’s also a shame that the teenagers receive all the screen time when they’re not particularly interesting characters in comparison. Because they’re established as bad people themselves, the audience is given very little reason to care if they make it out alive, with perhaps the exception of one boy who’s new in town and was dragged into this mess by the others. It might be satisfying if their punishments were painted as twisted lessons to scare them into becoming better people, but the horrors these teens encounter don’t quite have that tone to them, and there’s no genuine investment in seeing them get through the night safely, especially since the villains have far more dimension than the protagonists do.
The most frustrating aspect of The Call is that it doesn’t play by its own “rules.” The concept of the film feels fresh enough, and there’s some potential in its framework, but its execution derails it completely. It establishes itself as a film focused on the phone calls these teenagers are enticed to make, and we understand fairly early on that this task won’t be as simple as it sounds, but it has so many unnecessary twists that by the end, it doesn’t feel like that’s the story being told anymore. While there’s nothing wrong with clever reveals or plot twists when done properly, this one somehow felt like a betrayal to the audience’s trust by the end, made worse by some sloppy screenwriting.
The Call had many great things going for it: a few talented actors, some decent cinematography, and an interesting premise. It’s disappointing that by the third act, the film became a muddled mess of lost potential and disorganized storytelling, which superseded all of the positive aspects it had going for it in the end.
--Andrea Riley
