THE CALL (2020)

 

(Director/screenwriter: Chung-Hyun Lee, who based his work on Sergio Casci's screenplay. Streaming/Netflix movie. South Korean remake of the 2011 American film THE CALLER.)

 

Review

CALL is an okay film. It’s an imaginative disregard-logic/time-in-slipstreams flick where two young women in the same town (Bosung)─but twenty years apart─come into contact via telephone calls.

Seo-yeon (played by Park Shin-Hye) has returned to Bosung after a long absence (due to her father’s untimely death in her childhood). While settling in, she receives a phone call via her landline. She talks to a stranger, a young woman named Oh Young-sook (Jong-seo Jung). They quickly establish a rapport, even after they realize they’re from different time periods. There’s darkness in both of their lives, and they, in their different times, save each other from grief and danger─or so it seems.

Things get twisty when it’s revealed that neither woman is what she shows herself to be, whether it’s brought about by deception or repressed memories. The plot pretzels come violent and relentless (with a little blood in the encounters). I enjoyed the competent directing, cinematography, and the stellar acting by the two leads, but near the end I tired of the endless succession of wait, there’s more cleverness movie.

It has a solid, emotionally satisfying ending if you turn off the film just as the end-credits begin to roll. To watch CALL beyond that is to risk sequel-demanding scenes that ruined the movie for a lot of viewers (myself included), if online reviews are a reliable measure.