The Caller (2011)

When an abused wife finally makes the right call and pulls the plug on her marriage, the only mistake she makes is where she chooses to live after finally walking out on that puerile creep. For while the new apartment has lots of space, and is near the restaurant owned by the parents of her new beau, things take a sinister turn when a distraught woman keeps calling her number, looking for her own deadbeat husband.

At first thinking she's found a kindred spirit, the two women engage and swap their tales of woe, forming a bond in the process. But when a misunderstanding leads to a Hitchcockian, Strangers on a Train (1951) twist, resulting in the caller murdering her husband, our heroine decides to pull the plug.

But as her phone keeps ringing, the caller, feeling betrayed, gets more frustrated, then angry, then threatening, until finally dropping a bombshell: the caller thinks it's 1979 -- not 2011, and she's calling from the exact same apartment. And judging by all the evidence we've seen and heard thus far, the caller is obviously telling the truth...

As flesh-eating zombies and homicidal ghosts waged a bloody coup to dethrone the slashers and serial killers of the '90s and become the new Kings of Cinematic Horror back in the aughts, through big screen releases to whatever the hell The Asylum was knocking-off directly to your DVD player or natal streaming services, I found myself tipping the scales a bit while playing some Netflix roulette back in the day. Well, at least I thought I was.

See, judging by the descripto-blurb provided for Matthew Parkhill's The Caller (2011), when combined with that set-up and opening act, I thought I was dealing with just another angry spirit, who was ready to make life miserable for the latest occupant of the deceased's former abode, who, in turn, was just too damned dumb to leave. Turns out I was wrong. Completely.

More akin to Gregory Hoblit's Frequency (2000), where massive solar flares allow an adult son to communicate with his dead father some twenty years in the past via an old ham radio set, solve a string of murders, and change history, The Caller mines this same kinda sci-fi mash-up, combining Hoblit's film, the TV-show Quantum Leap (1989-1993), and the short story, A Sound of Thunder, where author Ray Bradbury effectively introduced the world to the cataclysmic rippling repercussions of time-travel by stomping on a butterfly -- resulting in the common nomenclature, "the Butterfly Effect," where altering the past, no matter how minutely, has a devastating effect on the present.

And while there are a few dire time-stream hiccups in Frequency, Parkhill's protagonist, Mary Kee (Lefevre), has no agent in the past to rely on to put right what now has gone egregiously wrong and is therefore completely at the mercy of one of the nastiest and vilest psycho-biddies to come down the pike since Margaret White -- the mom from Carrie (1976) for those of you who don't know who the hell I'm talking about. Egads I am old. 

Now, except for a brief glimpse, we only hear Rose through the temporal rotary phone line -- played beautifully by Lorna Raver, who similarly tormented Alison Lohman in Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell (2009) a few years earlier. And with each taunting preternatural call comes a new burp in the time-stream: secret messages scratched into the drywall that weren't there before; a finger buried in the backyard; a new wall in the pantry, where, as the movie progresses, more and more mummified bodies keep piling up in this new crawlspace as Rose's reign of terror grows back in 1979.

Meanwhile, in 2011, more and more people around Mary keep disappearing -- people only she remembers. You see, that's why Mary cannot stop answering the phone and just leave. For if she does, more people she knows and loves will "die" retroactively in the past as punishment, murdered by Rose 30 years ago -- some of them when they were children.

Thus, on her end of the phone, Mary submits but tries to find out more about Rose, who originally hung herself in the apartment back in '79 when her philandering husband ran out on her. (Sadly, it was the lifeline to Mary and her sympathetic ear that changed history.) And now, with the past in such a state of flux, Mary's research goes nowhere as history keeps changing, executed best with her ever-self-adjusting photo-albums, which show a past she no longer recognizes nor remembers.

Then, after an ingenious plan to beat Rose at her own game backfires, the audience realizes how thoroughly screwed Mary really is when Rose calls again and puts someone else on the phone, and Parkhill punctuates that point rather gruesomely with some scalding hot chicken grease, which had me squirming in the recliner during its application. GAH! But with this despicable act comes Mary's final salvation when the past and present finally collide for quite the denouement.

So, yeah, The Caller is more Sci-Fi than Supernatural, but that in no way or shape ruins things. The story was originally conceived by Sergio Casci and was first adapted as a half-hour episode of a short-lived BBC Scotland anthology TV-show called Two Lives (1998). The episode, Rose, was written by Casci, directed by Don Coutts, and consisted of two actors, only one of which actually appears on screen, and focused solely on the phone conversations and the historical repercussions.

Casci would also expand his script to feature length with some additional material added by Parkhill. Casci would later go on to co-write The Lodge (2019), and his screenplay for The Caller was adapted yet again for the South Korean thriller, The Call (Kol, 2020).

As for this adaptation, some may find the pace of The Caller a bit glacial as things unfold deliberately (-- I'd call it unrelentingly), but I found the presentation both engrossing and quite riveting -- except for one tactical mistake that we’ll be addressing in a sec. Beyond that the script is rock solid and doesn’t cheat despite the brain-bending premise. And It doesn’t hurt that the cast -- Lefevre, a last second replacement for Brittany Murphy, Stephen Moyer (John, the boyfriend) and Luis Guzmán (George, the landlord) -- are all charmingly endearing, giving their “disappearances” a hefty punch that's sorely lacking in a lot of these jump-scare-o-ramas.

Thus and so, I found the whole thing to be dreadfully spooky thanks to that deadly premise -- because Mary is so totally screwed as Parkhill and Casci detonate one most probable expectation after another as we barrel toward the climax with no cop-out, retroactive happy ending either. 

However! I will warn you all upfront that the final coda involving Mary’s abusive ex nearly derails all the goodwill that came before it and just reeks of a tacked on shock just to have a twist. A twist this film did not need. At all -- especially one that dumb. But! I refuse to let this misjudgement ruin the overall experience because otherwise The Caller really is just that damned good.

Originally posted on October 12, 2012, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

The Caller (2011) Alcove Entertainment :: Head Gear Films :: Pimienta :: The Salt Company International :: Samuel Goldwyn Films / EP: Robert Bevan, Phil Hunt, Cyril Megret, Compton Ross / P: Amina Dasmal, Robin C. Fox, Luillo Ruiz, Piers Tempest / AP: Belly Torres, Carlos Anibal Vázquez / D: Matthew Parkhill / W: Sergio Casci / C: Alexander Melman / E: Gabriel Coss / M: Aidan Lavelle, Unkle / S: Rachelle Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzmán, Ed Quinn, Lorna Raver