The Call (2020)

The Call

I don't normally answer my phone when there's an unknown number, but after watching the new Netflix film The Call, I'm definitely not answering. A phone call that connects two women from the past and present starts a dangerous game to change the future. Park Shin-hye and Jang Seo-joon star in this.

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The first is in the present, the latter is in the past, and they become connected after a fateful wrong number one night. This Korean thriller has the feels of Frequency with Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel, but this one way much darker. There are massive feelings of isolation, loneliness, and even helplessness.

And I love how someone doing something that they think is right sets off a domino effect of chaos. It's frustrating to watch play out, but not in a bad way. It just invested me that much more in the story.

Our two main characters are wonderful. They interact so well and have this great back and forth. All of their interactions are really on the phone and not physically on screen together.

This starts off building slowly, and we're painted a picture that I venture to say most of us would act in the exact same way that the character does. They hear something, believe they have the correct facts, and then make decisions based on those. It's twisted and fun how decisions in the future can be changed in the past to then affect the future.

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It's a little bit like Back to the Future 2. When you have the playbook from the future of everything that happens in the past, you can use that from the past to completely change the outcome of what's to come. But that's where it gets a little dark because those in the present or the future from the past are in a helpless situation. Because if I'm in the past and I'm affecting your future based on decisions that I make, you really don't have a lot of power, at least seemingly.

So the concept of the movie is dark, but also the setting is dark at times too, and that really helps the creep factor. The darkness just underscores the tone and creates some uneasiness. But I also like that we have back and forth, that we're not always in this dark sense, that sometimes it's kind of bright and cheery.

And so what that does is that puts us off kilter throughout the scenes. It jacks with our emotions because we know that we came from something dark and now we're in something kind of brighter and cheerier, maybe a little bit more positive, or even just it's lit differently. And so it does look more cheery and positive and bright, but there's always this sense of impending dread.

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Like this cheeriness can't last forever, can it? I think the special effects in this are done really well. When something in the past changes the future, we get to watch it morph. And so we get to see that full outcome and how it affects what is the future from the past, but really the present.

Our two main characters are spectacular. They each have qualities that make them very dynamic and very complex. There's a lot of cunning and intelligence that each of them employs at different times, and it makes it just a lot of fun to watch and see how their mind's working and how they are going to figure out a puzzle of how to either help or hurt the other one.

I really enjoyed the pacing of this too. It is steady and it's never static. The events progressed efficiently, but we also got to sit in our emotions. We got to fully experience some dread or some happiness or some sadness before moving on to another set of emotions.

The storytelling is tight and it's effective also. You figure with these multiple timelines going on, they have the opportunity to get lost or at least to create some massive plot holes.

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And I didn't feel that there were any. There was one point where I was scratching my head because I was trying to figure out how a character ended up where they did and in the situation that was surrounding them. And then it made complete sense. It answered it without explicitly answering it. And I appreciate that.

I appreciate that it treated me as an intelligent being that I can watch this and it doesn't have to spoon feed me every single bit of information. And in that scene that I was talking about where I'm scratching my head a little bit, trying to figure out how this character ended up, at this point, this is when urgency, tension, just thrills. They absolutely ramped up.

It's fun how there's a sort of game of cat and mouse, but the roles are constantly changing in this. This isn't a light watch. The feeling of helplessness and even hopelessness at times is a bit daunting, but it's still fun.

This is the type of storytelling that you're looking for when you want something to get your heart pounding, when you want some absolute thrills from some intelligent storytelling and just a really good story and watching how it builds and how they twist it and then how they resolve that twist to then create more twists. Be sure to watch until the credits roll. Otherwise, you might miss something important. I'm giving The Call four and a half out of five stars. I think it deserves it.

Bye for now