It’s common practice in cinema to depict a frantic 911 call to build suspense and drive the action, but what we rarely see is the other end of the line. Director Brad Anderson’s The Call takes us into one of the largest 911 call centers in Los Angeles and shows just how traumatizing answering these calls can be.
Halle Berry plays Jordan, a young woman who, while working at the call center, receives an urgent call from a teen girl, Casey (Abigail Breslin), who has been kidnapped and shoved in the trunk of a car. Jordan spends the majority of the movie on the phone with Casey, attempting to get inside the mind of the man who trapped her and desperately trying to figure out a way to find the car.
Though the idea may sound captivating, it doesn’t translate well on screen. The film gets off to a rough start with some overly dramatic foreshadowing involving the central kidnapper and a different girl. Casey is given very little character development and is only introduced in the scene immediately before her kidnapping, in which she is shopping with a friend.
Breslin has given impressive performances before — her role as the young girl in _Little Miss Sunshine _springs to mind — but as she has grown older her successes have become more and more fleeting. This one, in particular, is mediocre and slightly awkward in several parts. Berry makes up for what Breslin lacks, playing a believable and empowered heroine and doing a lot with the mediocre cards she was dealt. Michael Eklund’s performance as the kidnapper was also decent, his creepy clacking teeth and wild eyes soliciting a few good shudders out of me.
But, The Call never really delivered anything besides a little suspense. There were too many loose ends, most glaringly the kidnapper’s reasons for abducting the girls in the first place. Throughout the entire second half of the film, I was reminded of_ Silence of the Lambs_ — the dark basement, kidnappings and creepy psycho tendencies were all too familiar. But unlike in_ Silence of the Lambs_, it was difficult to decipher what the kidnapper’s motive was. Clues were scattered about the movie, but frequent scene switches and a desire for mystery in the plot made it tricky to know exactly what was going on.
The film’s one major success was its normalcy and relatability. The heroine is no superhero, and you can tell she’s scared to death throughout the film. The kidnapper also seemed like a fairly average person — or at least his wife seemed to think so. Many horror films’ villains are either brilliant or completely psychotic, but this kidnapper’s ability to instill fear comes from his utter normalcy — he could be any man you pass on the street.
Ultimately, The Call tried to do too much with an admittedly captivating idea, and suffered for it. Many movies of this genre simply seek to instill some fear, but The Call failed to even do that. The premise was frightening, but the film itself was rarely jump-out-of-your-seat scary.
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