The call on ‘Netflix’ is a remake of ‘The Caller’, a 2011 film with similar premise. I thought it was an original invention and was really impressed after I’d watched but that’s just a little dent in my joy.
I’ve not seen the original, so I can only speak about director Lee Chung-hyeon’s creation. It was extraordinary and felt like reading one of those choose-your-path-storybooks.
The story opens with Seo-yeon who’s just moved back to her old family home. She’s lost her phone on the train but the old landline in her home works. We see that she has a strained relationship with her mother who has cancer(does not live in the home) and who would like to be buried close to her late husband. Seo-yeon believes her mother’s carelessness led to the fire explosion which killed her father.
She gets a call on the landline from a female, a Young-sook who sounds distressed and who keeps repeating that her mother is trying to harm her. The calls are always brief with Young-sook hanging up in annoyance anytime she’s told that she’s calling the wrong line and that Seo-yeon does not know her.
These repeated calls pique Seo-yeon’s interest and she begins to snoop around in her old home. This snooping around leads her to breaking a wall and finding a hidden staircase into a huge room with old things owned by Young-sook. The pieces now begin to click especially with further calls where Young-sook mentions the address Seo-yeon is currently living in as her own address. She lived there but in a different time.
The story is not one of a haunted house as the parallel lives of both girls are equally fleshed out, so much so that Young-sook feels like a real person with a real hope of a second chance. In her previous life, her step mother, who was known to be a shaman had killed her because she’d foreseen death in her future. In a twist this time, since the girls connect on phone before major events occur–the death of Seo-yeon’s father and of Young-sook herself, they are able to prevent Seo-yeon’s father from dying and reality is altered from the past.
With this magical altering, and to repay Young-sook for her help, Seo-yeon reads up on how Young-sook dies and warns her, which in turn prevents her death. It looks like calm and peace are restored but the balance of life is thrown out and chaos follows.
If in the first half of the film, Young-sook was able to draw out empathy and relief for not having gotten herself killed, the second half follows her unhinged self with unlimited freedom as she kills a second time to cover her tracks. This killing was of an innocent strawberry farmer who’d discovered bags of her step-mother cut into pieces. In her old life, she’d been jailed for life and was now on Seo-yeon’s neck to assist her to find and hide the damning evidence to prevent this from happening a second time. Seo-yeon who was already beginning to spend less time with the landline and more with her family and who was feeling ill at ease with the new turn of events avoided those calls. This led to the speeding up vengeful acts of Young-sook whose activities in the past as we’d already seen could affect the future.
Life altered many times for Seo-yeon especially with her younger self trapped in the past and at the mercy of and older Young-sook. This film kept me on my toes, anticipating new ‘what-next’ moves. I loved every bit of it and the ending threw me into further chaos.
I give it a 10/10 rating.