The Call
Brad Anderson, 2013, USA
The most meaningful line of dialogue uttered in The Call is something close to this: “This job sometimes means you’re the difference between someone living or dying, and if you can’t stand that, you’ve got to get out.” As a quota-filling springtime thriller, it never intended to genuinely explore this internal conflict, instead aiming for a draw to the novelty of its network TV-quality dramatizations of 911 phone calls. A poor excuse for a thriller’s center lynchpin, emergency dispatcher Jordan receives a call from a teenage girl hiding from a remarkably sloppy killer hell-bent on attracting as much attention possible to his crimes. Jordan can’t shake feeling at fault for the girl’s murder, her psychological guilt serving as the trite occupational obstacle for her to surmount when he makes his second kidnapping. New victim Casey’s panicked cell phone call from the trunk of his car connects our heroines and constitutes the film’s tepid suspense exercises in cross-cutting and excessive close-ups before the ludicrous denouement that turns “just an operator” into a makeshift Clarice Starling. The film’s final act is built around the same hellish descent Jodie Foster made, but Jordan’s professional experience as a 911 dispatcher—experience that should signal how stupid it would be to sleuth around the abandoned countryside at night—does not make her a Starling, for Foster made those advances using intuition developed from gender-specific experiences while Halle Berry gets a lot of help from GPS and sound design. There’s even a great shot of an overhead American flag waving in the night breeze that recalls the transformative moment where Clarice kills her monster, the same note on which The Call should’ve ended before adding an even more bullshit twist demonstrating just how chummy and “empowered” an operator and a teenage girl can be in sharing a cheap revenge.
