Review: The Caller

Over-stylized and narratively undercooked, The Caller treats its Twilight Zone-style conceit for dim thrills.

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The Caller
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Over-stylized and narratively undercooked, The Caller treats its Twilight Zone-style conceit for dim thrills. In a new apartment of grungy green walls, faded tablecloths, and filthy floor tiles, Mary (Rachelle Lefevre) sits around in the pitch black fearing for her safety thanks to abusive husband Steven (Ed Quinn), who regularly stops by to violate her restraining order against him and make claims on their dog. However, more problematic than Steven—a monstrous spouse who’s less than one-dimensional—are the phone calls that Mary begins receiving from a mysterious woman named Rose, who claims to be trying to reach the unfaithful boyfriend she says lives in Mary’s home. It doesn’t take long before Mary and Rose both realize that they’re speaking across eras, with Mary in the present and Rose in 1979, and moreover, that Rose is a stone-cold psycho who, after Mary suggests that Rose adopt feminism and kick her louse boyfriend to the curb, goes a step further and murders him. This is all too much for Mary, especially once a strange brick wall suddenly appears in her pantry (behind it are bodies!), so she turns to John (Stephen Moyer), a professor at her college who, like Moyer’s gentlemanly vampire on True Blood, has a preternatural taste for women half his age.

For Mary, danger comes from both Steven and Rose, the latter of whom soon starts making Mary’s current acquaintances nonexistent (including a somnambulistic Luis Guzmán as a neighboring tenant) by killing them in the past. Since Mary also lived in the area as a kid, the perilous climax is telegraphed far in advance, though the film’s real menace is director Matthew Parkhill’s direction. Enshrouding everything in over-the-top darkness, and often positioning his panning camera behind bars and/or posts, Parkill shoots with a look-at-me aesthetic fit for a slick TV commercial, and, as with the innumerable ominous zooms toward Mary’s old-fashioned black phone, with half the subtlety.

From Mary’s stage-set apartment to John’s parents’ underlit restaurant, nothing appears real in The Caller, and the way in which the action indulges in long, underlined silences furthers the overriding sense of trying too hard to muster up a suspenseful mood from a conceit better suited to a half-hour television program. Lefevre and Moyer are unbelievable, but they’re mere victims of circumstance, forced to utter banal dialogue and, predictably, to have Cinemax-grade sex in silhouetting shadows. The reason for Mary and Rose’s temporal line-crossing ultimately proves half-formed, but then, that’s in keeping with a film that, after 90 minutes, can do no better than a finale derivative of The Shining involving a doltish young woman clumsily fleeing a crazy old lady.

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Score: 
 Cast: Rachel Lefevre, Stephen Moyer, Luis Guzmán, Ed Quinn, Lorna Raver  Director: Matthew Parkhill  Screenwriter: Sergio Casci  Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films  Running Time: 90 min  Rating: R  Year: 2011  Buy: Video

Nick Schager

Nick Schager is the entertainment critic for The Daily Beast. His work has also appeared in Variety, Esquire, The Village Voice, and other publications.

1 Comment

  1. Slammed by some critics (including that of ‘Slant’ magazine) for being unbelievable, this movie is really no dafter than any other horror film. The genre of horror demands a suspension of all reason. That’s the point of it. The secret is in the technique, the trick of the shaman to call up apparent dead people. It is the primitive mind shorn of rational defences and reduced to animal terror which we are hypnotised into confronting. And the technique of this conjuror of disturbed and angry spirits, Matthew Parkhill, is very effective so long as we are willing to suspend our belief in order to welcome the fascination of the irrational – like Mary’s irresistible involvement with the impossible Rose. After all, the daily newspapers show us how madness rules behind the curtains of private despair. How easy it would be to fall into that psychological abyss . . . a place where anguish and death build the very fabric of a domestic Hell. We’ve made a pet out of our neuroses, just to remind us of our primitive guilty selves, immured behind the walls we build to bury those ancient, bloody, obscene memories that lurk in the shaky foundations of our sheltered yet insecure little world of that ultimate make-believe: A rational universe.

    Curiously, the film avoids the usual cliché of supposed animal sensitivity to unseen beings, and does not show the family dog growling protectively towards his owner, or cowering in terror from such spirits. But the avoidance of that dramatic trope of spiritualistic manifestation enhances, if anything, the assault on reason, since it is only that uniquely human objectivity which is most threatened by the collapse of reason. Of course, a simple household pet will naturally be unperturbed by the unstable complexity of the human brain. This huis clos is an entirely human trap, the nightmare within our highly artificial nature, which has departed so far from the simple animal that we no longer trust our fellow humans, in whom we still see the source of all our ancient terrors. It is the pet, after all, who is the only really domesticated member of this riven and feral, dehumanised family of potential, and actual ghouls. In Sartre’s revelation, “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. The ghostly family of Man haunts itself in us, not the simple creatures who have come in to shelter under our roofs. Death only threatens them at the point when it becomes inevitable. Human beings must sense Death every day, for we are haunted by the vivid presence of it in the living nightmare of self-awareness. We have come to suspect that, far from being superior to the World, we are its contradiction, and consequently are being stalked by those Avenging Demons who come to reclaim their Dominion over us.

    I was thoroughly spooked. The catharsis was accomplished. The ritual submission to horror stimulated a pleasurable release of all these evil spirits. The horror genre represents the survival amongst ‘civilised’ peoples of the ancient rites of exorcism, the dispelling of those fearful nightmares we have inherited. This confrontation with Evil steadies us to withstand what lurks within the dark shadows stirring deep in the mind’s echoing cavern. We hunt them, as they prey upon us. It is a matter of survival. We are but stalking our ancient selves in that crepuscular nowhere. This is the circular Dance of Death, around a guttering fire. Nothing survives but Fear, murdering through all the generations – the ultimate Vendetta of the human family against itself. That old, original Guilt will never be expunged. We will forever shiver at its recollection, whenever the Old Spirits are called forth. “Your Death is coming” they declare.

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